Saw this on Facebook and thought we could all use a diversion.
What is the most disgusting dinner you were forced to eat as a child and have never eaten as an adult?
This.
This is holodetz. Traditional winter “holiday” food. Pardon me while I gag.
It starts with pig feet. I kid you not, pig feet is a required ingredient. First, you take pig feet and whatever other meat you want to throw in there, put it into a large pot, fill it with water, and let soak overnight. This will remove old blood from the meat. Once it stands over night, wash the meat again, cover with water, bring to boil, pour that water off, and rewash the meat. Add more water, about an inch or so over the meat, and simmer on low about 6-7 hours. About an hour or so before it’s done, add salt, pepper, bay leaf, onion, carrot, etc. When it finishes boiling, remove the meat, tear it into chunks with forks, pour the broth back over it, once you put it through a wire colander, and stick it in the fridge, or in case of Russians, into the small outer mud-room where you take shoes off and that stays naturally cold in winter but above freezing. Let it stand overnight or so.
It’s hard to describe it. It’s cold meat, boiled into softness, in meat jelly. Cold meat jelly. Okay, I am gagging now again. Ugh, I hate this. Every damn holiday it would be brought out and I would be expected to eat it. ::Shudder.::
For my children, the worst childhood food is likely apples with pork chops. One day I was tired of making same-old, same-old, and so I made grilled pork chops with Granny Smith apple apples. It looked something like this: Martha Stewart’s Pork Chops with Apples. For some odd reasons, the kids freaked out. Meat and apples just did not go together in their head. I was treated to a lovely piece of dinner time theater, with gagging, pretended vomiting, exclamations of “What is this?” and accusations of poisoning. Never made it again. It’s been ten years and they still remember it once in a while.
Okay, now your turn.
As an experiment, we have enabled a plugin that allows images to be embedded in the comments. This is potentially a feature that could be abused, but we decided to give it a shot. 🙂
I’m not fond of jellied meat concoctions (and that goes for foie gras in aspic as well),in fact I avoid Jello, but what really does me in are custard pies.
I can’t explain it but the pie crust custard combo is gag worthy.
I always think of Pork and Apples as going together. Maybe it’s because of the Brady Bunch episode where Peter ran around saying Pork Chops and Applesauce the whole episode, which I saw as a child. In the summer, my mother always made this zucchini casserole with ground meat, tomato sauce and chucks of zucchini. I hated it. The funny thing is I love zucchini now as long as it’s not that casserole.
Yeah, I was raised with my mother saying that pork and apples go together. I don’t like meat and fruit to be cooked together, but I’m totally okay with pork being served with a side of cooked apple slices or applesauce. 🙂
As for worst food…I’m totally a picky eater, so I don’t have anything to say.
I think you will win, but mine is actually a week of meals we were forced to eat at Camp Fire Girl camp in the summer of ’79. The worst was some kind of fish on Wednesday. It ruined me for life, I have never been able to smell fish again without gagging.
My husband has stories of his Polish Babci and her Borscht; basically veggies and leftover ‘meat’ thrown into the leftover kielbasa water.
Thank you
Liver and onions. I absolutely despise this dish. And of course, it’s one of my dad’s favorites, so I had to choke it down on a semi-regular basis. I must have used a bottle of ketchup on a 1/4 inch piece of liver and a sliver of onion. I’d hold my breath, hold my nose and enact dying of the stomach flu every time I was forced to eat it.
As for pork chops and apples, my mom will not eat pork without applesauce. I can’t imagine anyone thinking it’s gross.
I agree on the liver and onions. For my own children it would be ratatouille… something about the texture meant that dinner was reduced to gagging and even some vomit at the dinner table when I insisted that they had to have several bites.
My god!! I completely agree, my sister loved the dish so at one point in our house it was a regular meal. ?? Still the worst thing you could make me eat. Xx
This is funny because both my parents hated liver and onions so much I never saw it. For me it’s probably corner beef and cabbage although its been so long I barley remember why.
The smell of cooking cabbage, that’s why for me. Corned beef and cabbage was one of my dad’s favorites, and he would have it ready to go in the pot whenever I went to Grandma’s. I could still smell it in the house days later. Ick!
Liver and onions – ick.
Ew, this does look singularly gross. Call me crazy, but “jellied” and “meat” are two words that have no business being in the same sentence. For me, it’s poached eggs. Those jiggly uncooked egg whites make me shudder.
I don’t like eggs looking at me, so basted or over medium are fine. I do like soft yolks. Scrambled solves many problems, too.
Lima beans. hated them, had to eat them. Won’t touch them now.
Also, that thing up there looks like it uses sawdust as an ingredient. I wish I could pretend I hadn’t read the ingredients and could pretend sawdust WAS the ingredient.
My brother and sister-in-law just had a summer party and had a roasted pig brought in. It was cooked offsite, then brought to the part and presented with palm leaves and the requisite apple in the mouth. We took pictures with it, then the food works took that sucker apart. So you could always show them a picture of a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth.
As for most disgusting thing my mom made, I think I’d have to go with SOS (shit on shingles), which is corned beef in a milky sauce on bread. And the name fits. As does the taste. I hate corned beef and I really hate soggy bread.
I’ve always heard haggis is pretty gag-inducing, too. Never tried it, though.
And people think I’m weird for actually liking Spam.
Haha, I actually like SOS and have trouble finding a breakfast place that makes it. The official name is creamed dried beef over toast.
We had it for dinner, not breakfast. I can’t remember if SOS is what it was called in the Army (my dad was a tank driver during peace time), or if it got the name because he was a depression-era baby and that’s what it was called during that time. It does respond to a Google search, so it wasn’t something made up in my family. (And with my dad, that was always a possibility.)
My dad called it SOS, also. He said it was from his army days, and he loved it.
My dad also called SOS. He was in the Air Force right around the Korean War. He didn’t have kind thoughts about it. 🙂
Yes, Dad also called this SOS from his army days which would have been in early 60’s. He would make it for us every couple of months. We ate because he expected us to eat whatever he cooked and be grateful. None of us make or consume. His pancake, apple cake, tree stars (aka steamed broccoli with carrot ‘sticks’) and oven cooked fish recipes we all make regularly. Corned beef and steamed cabbage– maybe once a year.
Haggis is simply the Scots version of sausage.
Here’s a life lesson, though: never ever ever think about what’s in sausage. Just eat it. Because “sausage” means random pieces of protein from an animal, ground or minced in various ways, flavored some spices and sometimes vegetables, often stretched with some kind of filler, squished into a shape, and cooked. Blood sausage, polska kielbasa, italian links, scrapple, bratwurst, haggis, balogna/baloney, andouille,…. they’re all ways to capture and preserve animal protein!
Haggis tastes like sausage, too. I loved it. I’m throwing in with the liver crowd. Can’t do it. Not beef liver, not chicken livers, not nohow. And for the record, I am one of those folks who’ll eat just about anything! I have, in fact, eaten the jellied meat stuff. But liver? I would say that it comes up faster than it goes down, except that it won’t go down at all.
The first time I had liver was at a wedding. It was wrapped in bacon. A travesty. I didn’t even know it was there or what it was but I almost vomited it tasted so bad. Well what do you expect? The liver cleans the blood. Why would you eat it?
Creamed herring. OK, no one forced me to eat it, but both my Dutch grandpas would eat it in front of me. That was bad enough. *shudder*
Well I actually liked liver as a kid my GM used to hook it up not sure I would eat it now buuuut those deceptive mini cabbage looking soooooo not tasting like cabbage brussel sprouts r the worst thing I have ever eaten and turnips are not great either.
No pictures. It was the liver & onions my Dad made us one night when Mom was down at Grandma & Grandpa’s (about 4 hours away). It smelled awful, it tasted worse and the texture was terrible. We were required to choke it down anyway. I was about 8 years old at the time and I’m nearly 52 now, never touched it since. He never made it in the house again (Thank Heavens!!), but HE loved it and would often get it when he saw it on the menu at a restaurant. Oddly, now I do feel a little guilty that we hated it so, because it truly was a dish he loved. But only a very little… =)
Wait, did I eat dinner with you? I just remember my mom trying to convince me it was steak (we were quite poor at the time, so “steak” was always in the form of some type of ground beef with pasta/rice in some accompanying sauce), so I thought yay steak. I kept questioning her about it being steak cause it smelled so badly, but she assured me it was steak. Well, It was Not. I have never touched liver again even though it is probably one of the best things you can consume for your health.
I’m surprised it didn’t turn you off steak, since that’s what you grew up thinking steak tasted like.
Mine’s not as bad as yours (which I would absolutely hate) but tomatoes. When I was around 8 or 10, can’t remember, my parents decided to make me and my younger brother have tomatoes. Like, just bite into a whole thing, by itself. We both threw up immediately after. Parents never made us do so again. I can take slices of tomatoes to go with burgers, but I usually don’t notice, which is nice. Funny enough, my favourite condiment is ketchup 🙂
Me too! I physically cannot consume raw tomatoes, especially when it’s only tomato and doesn’t have anything else (like a burger) to protect my poor senses. Cooked tomatoes are totally fine though.
Yep, for me it’s texture thing with tomatoes — that slimy pulp gets me every time. I also don’t like cooked tomatoes, but tomate-sauced-based items I can handle. Never liked tomato soup either, so it wasn’t all texture, but taste, too.
This is going to sound weird but I’m allergic to raw tomatoes. I learned the hard way when I was about 7 years old. My godfather, who was a physician, told me it’s the citronella wax in the tomatoes that I’m allergic to after asking me a ton of questions. I can eat cooked tomato products but never raw.
Huh! I like tomatoes, but mostly the ones my mom grows in her garden; the ones in the store are bred to look pretty, but don’t have a lot of flavor.
I tend to cook from scratch a lot, but we all have blind spots.
Recently, my 20-year-old daughter bought a frugal cookbook (eat well on $4/day/person), and it included a recipe for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. I was ecstatic! It suddenly dawned on me that tomato soup didn’t have to come from a red-and-white can!
Fried Fish biscuits. I liked the taste of them until I saw my mom making them and was so grossed out by seeing the actual fish that I never ate them again.
Well, that could explain vodka consumption in Russia.
I eat almost every thing. As a kid I had an issue eating peas. I finally learned to just swallow them whole.
As an adult I won’t eat one of my Filipino wife’s favorite foods, green mango with shrimp paste. Too sour, too salty, too fishy.
Fried mackerel. The fish smelled horrible because it was always frozen, never fresh (the closest sea is at least 400 km away). I just refused to eat it.
Btw the Bulgarian version of holodetz is called “pacha”. It could be served either in a solid state (like in your pictures) or as a soup.
Cream chipped beef on Toast it is also know as SOS (shit on a shingle). Ours was not made from corned beef but from a packaged of processed beef labeled “Chipped Beef”. My mother believed you were not excused from the table until your plate was clean no matter how long it took or how much you whined and gagged. I therefore perfected the “fork to mouth to napkin to dog” technique once I was left alone at the table. Fortunately that dog would eat anything! The sauce is now used as colored slime on Nickolodeon.
I have two things that happened as a child. Things I still won’t eat
1. My grandma would make these salads (which I loved) but would always at Celery. I can’t Stand celery, the remembrance of the taste alone makes me gag. So everytime I would ask if there was celery in it. And she would always say no. So I would start excitingly on my salads. I would take a bite and bite right in to a piece of celery. Ughhh I hate that taste. I think they always thought I just didn’t like the idea of celery so would eat it if I didn’t know. But that’s not the case.
2. My second one also involves my grandma, but was mostly my fault. When I was kid my grandma would indulge me if I didn’t like dinner. She would make rice for me and than I could at cinnamon, sugar, butter to make an amazing concoction. So I would go to the kitchen cabinet and get the cinnamon shaker to put on my rice. Accept that wasn’t the cinnamon shaker and I added copious amounts of brown spice to my rice still thinking it was cinnamon. So I go and take a bite and almost throw up realizing I added nutmeg in copious amounts to my rice. It was so much nutmeg, and nutmeg is already really strong. Still till this day, the scent of nutmeg makes me nauseous. I can’t have it anywhere near me or in any dishes. If a recipe asks for nutmeg I remove it. I mean nutmeg wouldn’t make the recipe any better, so won’t be missed!
Till this day no celery or nutmeg for me!
Steamed okra. For some reason my mom loved it. I thought it was the same as eating snot.
I love okra. Love it. I can wax lyrical about all the ways I love it.
But steaming it? Why would you do that to okra?
Jarred herring in sour cream. For years I had a very heard time eating any WHITE food because of this, even whipped cream. My mom loved it and would eat it straight out of the jar. Shudder
Ewww. That’s up there with my dad eating canned sardines on crackers. Waste of a good cracker.
I should have read this post sooner. My mom didn’t like the creamed herring since she thought the cream destroyed the flavor of the herring. She loved pickled herring from the same company as the creamed herring. Me? No way to either creamed or pickled herring.
Salad Olivier. ..lol
After reading your post, I found it intriguing. My fiance is a meat & potatoes guy & I thought why not…well he freaked…I used ground sausage rather than the bologna…
However, it was the mayo & granny smith apple together that he couldn’t understand.
Personally I enjoyed it..
Now my “ewww” is probably not as bad as some of the others mentioned, in fact, I think alot of people enjoy this dish. However, trying to sneak something “nutritious” into an 8-10 year olds food without warning will always backfire. I love cottage cheese, especially with a slice of fresh garden tomato; I like fresh pineapple. One day my mother decided, “why not combine the two main ingredients and see what she does.” pause…gag, choke. So while enjoying my meal of whatever it was, I dig into my cottage cheese – except there is funky lumps in it. O_O I was sure she had fed me out of date, need to be thrown away food “Mom what did you do to the cottage cheese? It tastes bad!”
I still like both – but never, ever, mix the two without violent gagging.
You need the pig’s feet for the jelly…
For me? Mom used to cook canned okra straight outta the can. Boiled. As a chef and father, I try to live the idea that there are no foods I don’t like, I just haven’t learned to like them yet. I learned to love Brussel’s sprouts. Still not okra. The snot of the vegetable world. Gack! Also? Abalone guts. Was working with a Japanese sushi chef who was poor growing up. Really poor. He was sake drunk and maudlin and nostalgic. We had some fresh abalone. So he prepped the guts (something they did as kids out of necessity.) which we always throw out, with soy sauce, sake, a little vinegar, and tried to feed it to me. My mouth, all of it’s own accord, spit the crap out as soon as it touched my teeth. Three times in a row. The only other time my mouth did that was when I bit a dry farmed habanero that was so spicy my teeth went numb and my mouth hurt for half an hour. Anyway, the abalone guts were like a cross between okra and rotting seafood. I am sure this is what they serve in hell for meals. To this day I get sorta queasy just thinking about it. Vile. Truly vile and disgusting. Revolting and repellent.
Abalone guts. Shudder. (If you roast sliced okra with oil and salt at 450F, the snot goes away.)
MerryB, I will give it a try. Thank you!
Also, make sure your knife is sharp before you cut your okra as this prevents the “slime.”
Sorry AC but I love okra in all its cooked forms. However, one of my sibs will only eat fried okra. I have noticed when I am chauffeuring her to her monthly doctor appointment that she gets fried okra from bojangles with her morning breakfast biscuit and it looks to be not slimy. lots of carbs and fat from the fried breading thou. by the time we get to her appointment the fried okra is completely gone. I have no clue what the sauce is that comes with as she does not eat that.
I will try the roast method suggested by MB as I do that with other veggies like zucchini and kale and sweet potatoes and eggplant and …..which are delicious and supposedly healthier good for me than potato chips.
never have been offered albalone guts and most likely never will try to consume as I have to watch my salt intake. I agree about the hot pepper as I raise hot peppers for one of my BILs and I only made the tasting mistake once. Supposedly the heat generated is good for body but I prefer to be able to feel my lips and tongue and mouth…..
no picture but many non-happy family food YUCKY.
standard like others, any liver meals, those were rare. for me anything green in a can – french style green beans, peas, brussel sprouts (yes in a can). right now the gag reflexes are going and the moisture in my mouth is putrid as i try not to bring those memories to the forefront – now I have goose pimples and i think someone just walked over my grave…..shudder shudder shudder.
BTW we also grew up with pork and applesauce or apples, i wonder if it is a UK thing, my grandparents were from overseas and taught my momma her cooking skills. also I now love asparagas but hated the “boil the crap” outta it meals we had as children.
oh and tapioca pudding – I swear when dad said it was sheep’s eyeballs it grossed me out
My dad told me tapioca was fish eggs!
I lovingly call it, crapioca >:D
My mom called tapioca snail eggs.
I was told it was fish eyes. I learned to like when I was older. And found out what it really is. Now I crave it when my stomach acts up.
My dad went for snake eyes…
And I hate milk with a passion. My mama made me drink 1 glass at dinner until I finally got her to set me free at age 12. It was one of the happiest days of my live!
I was raised to eat whatever was put on the table. Before I was 8, my folks would load up my plate with whatever was fixed and I was to clean my plate before I could leave.
Mother, one horrible night, made creamed squash. It was an amalgamation of squash and heavens only knows what else, and soft and squishy. It had no taste, no salt, no pepper, nothing redeeming aside from it being on my plate. It reminded me of mushy cardboard, brought to a boil and left set until ultra slimy.
My father didn’t take any and I was stuck at the table for a good hour before he sampled what was on my plate (I had learned to not mess with something I didn’t like and I *might* be forgiven for not eating it).
The look on my father’s face was enough for him to pick up my plate and dump it in the sink while telling me to go and get ready for bed.
*shudders*
Pink stew anyone?
All leftovers possible with beetroot.
Kinda like blood stained vomit, but more gross…eech!
One day my mother prepared a dish from her childhood…beef tongue. It was the only time I can remember that my dad did not require us to clean our plates.
One year in junior high we did a meal in home economics with beef brains and tongue. The brains were scrambled like eggs and the tongue was pressure cooked with current jelly. Not sure if it was the teacher’s idea or mine but I remember collecting them from the meat processing plant. Sort of makes me gag now but I don’t remember it bothering me then. The tongue wasn’t bad but skinning it was icky. I was surprised at how large it was. I don’t like cottage cheese, instant gag reflex.
I remember the first time I saw cow tongue in a butcher shop it freaked me out and I couldn’t stop staring at it. I wasn’t even thinking of anyone eating it, even though it was in a butcher shop. I just couldn’t get over how freaking big it was.
I was wondering if anybody would mention these two things!! Came home one day, opened the pot on the stove, and saw a beef tongue staring (if you will) back at me. Eeew!!! And my Mom, until the day she died, liked calf brains scrambled with eggs. I think it’s a European thing — especially people from earlier in the 20th century.
My go to response about not eating all those organ meats is the cholesterol level in those things — much smarter to avoid!!! ?
Yeah, I have no problem with the taste or texture of tongue now, but walking into the kitchen and seeing that huge tongue on the counter… Ick. I was probably around 10 or 12 years old, and I couldn’t walk back into the kitchen until my mom put it away.
As a child I was taken to a REALLY crowded butchery. I was 5-6? Just tall enough to be pressed against a stack of beef tongues in the case. They were spotted, had huge taste buds, and nasty gristly bits where it had been cut out. If I am served tongue and don’t know what it is I’ll eat it. I usually figure it out after a couple bites. Depending on my mood and the mustard on it, I may or may not continue.
Brains. EEeewwgh! In France I thought I’d ordered sweetbreads, which don’t bother me. Got something that had no flavor but a funky texture. Split it lengthwise. My wife still laughs over the expression on my face when I got sight of the lab-slide like view.
Snails. Out of the backyard. Cooked until they looked like slugs dried on the sidewalk.
I am a texture based eater so anything mushy: creamed corn, creamed peas and scalloped potatoes. Love all these things prepared any other way. Also to this day I cannot stomach Shepard’s Pie (again texture matters)!
Some 8 years ago, I had an accident and broke both of my femurs. Because i come form a Mexican household, one of my aunts told my mom to give me Chicken Gizzard Soup, as it will help with the bone healing. So for almost a month i had to eat this soup that first tasted awful and the meat felt like plastic, but they told my mom to not add any vegetables, as the broth was supposed to be just of the meat.
I could find a picture as the one like the soup i ate, but here is one that almost resembles my memory.
Sure it wasn’t tripe?
For me it was creamed spinach.. Very popular at the time but unfortunately all that was available was frozen spinach which was then creamed. I was made eat it and refused point blank to eat it again and remain traumatised by the whole experience.
Oddly enough I love spinach now as a salad, or barely wilted but there is no way I will touch the creamed variety.
The worst for me was a glass of hot milk. Ugh, just thinking of it makes me want to gag. As a kid growing up in china we always drank hot stuff cause its supposedly better for your body and boiled stuff was just safer to drink. But there would always be a film that forms on top of the milk and it would just taste so bad. Now i can drink cold milk but i usually only take a sip once a month or so.
Hi Anna , yes hot milk is disgusting IMO. In Russia we had to eat rice or noodles with hot milk. To this day I cannot eat it or smell it
The worst dish I was ever forced to eat was some sort of fish on a half-cooked pizza crust with some sort of white sauce and no cheese served to me as a teen overseas while my parents visited friends. I can’t imagine how it could have been remotely considered as being classified as a pizza. And as to those liver-and-onion haters up there, I found a way I could eat it after years of exposure: TONS of mashed potatoes and gravy. Don’t let it get cold! Wow, does that bring back memories. Thanks Ilona!
Direct quote from my younger son, fresh from his first days away at college: “They have the chinese beef and broccoli that you like and I don’t, and the corn today also has weird stuff in it. … But I did have a banana with lunch and an apple with dinner and a banana last night.”
Ah! At least he ate fruit! 🙂
I come from a multi-cultural family and was raised in an even more multi-cultural environment. And I was the really easy kid when it came to food. My younger brother mostly would only eat white things until he was well into his teenage years*. I was the kid who wanted steamed clams and potstickers for my birthday when I was six. And my favorite vegetables were broccoli and brussels sprouts. I ate octopus. I ate chicken feet. I was a devotee of the many forms of eggplant.
And then I would run into things like jello salad. (I could just about tolerate plain jello. When I was sick, say.) And peaches. (In my defense, all the peaches that were available in western washington in the seventies and eighties were hard and mealy – I did not know peaches.) And then jello salad with peaches. And whip cream. I swear, it tasted like overly sweet half rotten vomit to me. (I have learned to love peaches. I still find jello salad vaguely horrifying and a likely sin against food.)
* He’s like 6’4″, too. Though his posture is terrible.
Haha, as the youngest I was not forced to eat anything because my older brother WAS forced and proceeded to throw up all over the dinner table. But, my mother would serve canned asparagus and it was so smelly, slimy, and disgusting, that just having it near me made me have dry heaves. I was probably in my thirties before I tried fresh, properly prepared, asparagus and realized it was yummy. I cannot abide canned vegetables of any kind.
This wasn’t a holiday meal, but it was a once-only occurrence. When I was around 10, I stayed with my much-older sister (18 years older than me) and her husband for a week. My sister made canned tomato soup, something I liked. I asked for some crackers, I liked to dip them with my soup. My sister took handfuls of saltine crackers and crumbled them up to the point my soup was cracker stew. It ruined the soup and turned it into pink goo. And she made me eat every bite. To this day I won’t eat tomato soup.
As for liver, my mother loved it but my father and I didn’t, so I didn’t have to suffer through that (my sympathy for all of you who did). But they both liked mushrooms. I’m with the person who has food texture issues. I can’t stand the texture of mushrooms. My mother would put them in the food, and I would meticulously pick them out. Each And Every One.
Me, too. I had a system with my oldest brother. I would pick out the mushrooms then put them on his plate to eat. Still works to this day, and we’re in our 40s and 50s.
Tuna Casserole. Ugh! Because it was a simple recipe we kids could make. When I made it, it was mostly noodles. Because we bought the cheapest tuna, which always tastes like that can taste plus cheap gross tuna. And because the recipe was simplified for kids, lots of super gross warm mayonnaise.
As I got older I disliked it more and more until I refused to make it.
Another thing was my mom would sometimes crave cabbage. I was the youngest, so I didn’t know that was a trigger for my older siblings that our mom was pregnant. One day our mom came home with four cabbages and made an enormous cabbage salad. But it wasn’t the normal recipe. It was raw cabbage chopped up and crushed canned pineapple and no dressing. My mom served herself a mixing bowl worth and came back for seconds. We all gathered to stare and she was like, “What?” So my sister finally asked, “Are you pregnant?” Keeping in mind our mother was in her 50s, which is really what surprised everyone.
She didn’t even realize that the cabbage was a tell for her. We all laughed, but it was a frantic few minutes there. She ate almost all the raw cabbage herself.
I forgot to try a picture!
Zucchini Lasagna. Those are NOT noodles 🙁
I think that picture looks good. 😛 I’d try it no problem. Though, I was watching a woman eat an eggroll with ketchup the other day and it grossed me out so bad!!! Ugh. But cold, congealed meat jelly….if I liked it and with crackers… sounds like a good snack to me. 🙂
When I was in grade I got lunch at school and there was slimy canned spinach. I took a mouthful and promptly vomited all over me and others. Trying to get the smell out of the clothes was difficult. Spinach is still not a favorite. If the recipe calls for frozen spinach if possible I use fresh or none at all. Probably why I never forced food on the kids except for a small taste that must be eaten and then forget it.
Our family legend was ham mousse, which was meat in jelly–similar to the start of the discussion. We were all released from eating it after my brother threw up at the table after one bite.
tripe, also known as cow stomach. Never ate it but my German mother loved it – it was a comfort food for her. I was fascinated by it but wouldn’t eat it – the idea of it was very off-putting.
My dad had an english-irish background and loved the british version of ‘holodetz’ which he called brawn (or ‘head cheese’ because apparently in addition to the feet, his people also cooked the head of the pig). He made it a lot. Initially he used pork hock but they were really fatty and he switched to pork shoulder roast and gelatine. He added a number of different spices too, including cloves and ginger. He died a number of years ago, after a lengthy stay in the hospital and towards the end, brawn was the only thing he would eat. I would make it for him while he was in hospital, but I never actually ate it myself…. again, more the idea of it, I think, than the reality 🙂
My Dad loved tripe with vinegar, and brawn, he called it porkcheese.
The special occasion food in my family was oyster soup at Christmas. It disappeared after my uncle got married. I believe there was an ultimatum involved.
The one-time, never again food was courtesy of my mother. She found a recipe for canned peaches cooked in baked beans. Weird in looks, texture, and flavor. I didn’t have to say anything. Dad still brings it up occasionally.
Stewed Tomatoes and okra, need I say more?
YES!!! This is the worst!
My Mom made this all the time and whew!
Also creamed onions. So wrong.
Tomatoes are the only thing that makes okra tolerable for me.
Holodetz was my favorite food growing up. We did not use pigs feet but chicken feet and it was yam! I think the most discussing thing I ever tried is gefilte fish in a jar. I love home made gefilte fish but to it it from a jar words cannot describe the taste of it.
It’s funny how different people from differvent countries view what is tasty and what is discusting. For example for many people who used to live in former USSR cow tong, chicken feet , holodetz is the best food ever.
Sauerkraut…..can’t even stand the smell of it cooking.
While I’m an Amazon these days at 6’2, until I hit my growth spurt finally at 11, I was always the smallest kid in all my classes (not helped by skipping ultimately 3 grades, so always the youngest by an ever growing margin to add to the ‘fun’) and my grandmother, who I spent most of the summer each year with, was always convinced I was going to just drop dead in front of her, having wasted away. My summers were spent being force fed with the fervor of what is normally reserved for geese on their way to becoming pate! As she was a good cook, mostly it was fine (and god knows I spent so much time racing about I needed the fuel) but the horror show came at night…
She would make these milkshakes for my big brother and myself (chocolate for me, vanilla for him) and make us chug them right before bed, thinking we couldn’t burn them off if we had to sleep for a few hours after drinking them. Sounds nice right? Hot summer nights, no AC so we would sleep out in the sunporch under the fan, creamy milkshakes – and our mom never let us have all that much sugar when we were home so double the treat! Except… gram would make the shakes, pour them into our glasses, and before handing them over would crack 4 whole eggs into each. Raw. Rocky-style. Not even letting them go thru the blender where the blades might possibly mix it in until it was unnoticeable. Nope. Just folded in with the straw and handed over. You know what happens to eggs when they hit icecream? They semi-freeze. Into horrible strings and chunks of egg threaded all thru the shake. Massive globules of snotty yolks, coming up in viscus chunks thru the straw. And you HAD to drink all of it. Even begging and tears got you no where. I usually tried to chug and then lay really still hoping I wouldn’t barf – my brother would throw fits, cry, beg, throw up… and gram would just make another and force him keep going. To this day I can’t drink a milkshake. Even just typing this makes me shudder.
Oh. And while we wouldn’t find out for years….. turns out I’m highly ~allergic~ to eggs.
OK you win. that’s just discussing!!!!
I have two. My mom always boiled brussel sprouts. I would just put on about a tablespoon of salt on each sprout to get them down. My dad once made boiled squid. Little squids about 8 inches long with NO sauce or cut up or anything. Just a whole squid complete with eyeballs and everything. I poked it with my fork and juice squirted out of it and I said “NOPE!” Luckily I was old enough to not be forced to eat it.
Two dishes from me and one from my mom.
Dish one: lamb shanks with dehydrated peaches. My mom made this once. She didn’t realize that about an inch and a half of the liquid on top was fat. Greasy, slightly sweet meat. Tasted something like a lamb chop that had gone more than slightly off, aka rotten meat.
Dish two: take 1/4 cup beef stew, add enough water to make two cups, add at least 1/4 teaspoon salt to give the result something resembling flavor, eat. My mom did this to me once and was wondering why I threw out all that “lovely gravy”.
Now for my mom’s contribution. Whenever my mom was sick as a child, her mother would serve what she called milktoast, a cup of warm milk poured over toasted bread. My mother hated milk, warm or cold, and liked her toast crunchy. Though she did like creamed eggs on toast or waffles. BTW creamed eggs is hard boiled eggs in a bechemel sauce.
The worst food I had as a kid was Malt-O-Meal. My Mom felt like we needed a hot breakfast in the winter, so she would get up, make a big pan of Malt-O-Meal on the stove and then let it sit until she got us up. It congealed. Hard, cold, and when you added milk (something I still don’t really like the taste of) it was lumpy nastiness. I still can’t eat it. But…one of my kids came home from a friends house and wanted me to buy this really great breakfast food! Yep, Malt-O-Meal. Evidently when you make it in the microwave and eat it right away it’s not disgusting. I told them I would buy it, make it for them, but no way was I ever eating that stuff, and felt like a mean Mom for even serving it.
I felt the same way about Kool-Aid, and the kids did the same thing with it!
I have another: Cream of Wheat. To me it looked like wallpaper paste.
Sago pudding. Growing up we only had dessert after sunday lunch and it was usually rice pudding (edible as long as I didn’t have to eat the skin off the top) semolina (fairly disgusting but I would eat it without complaining too much) or sago/tapioca pudding – it was the texture of those horrible slimy balls. After I finally threw up, rather than just gagging, Mum never made me eat it again. She still made me eat runner beans and broad (lima) beans though and I hated them both.
I love apples/apple sauce with pork but agree about jellied meat, it is a disgusting combination. I won’t even it pork pie because of the jelly between the meat and the pastry.
Also black pudding.
My Mum used to make rice pudding on the hob and she always burned it, you could stand a spoon up in it. It was vile, had loads of burned bits for extra texture, I still shudder now thinking about it lol
For me it was fried chicken gizzards. My Dad was so proud of himself everytime he made them. I could eat the mashed potatoes & gravy, but the gizzards? Not so much. Two little round, tough, stringy pieces of meat connected with like a tendon or something and deep fried. Icky!
Shudder. Now, chicken gizzards cooked in the slow cooker until tender, then fried with corn meal crust, those are good. You have to put the gizzards in the crock pot on low at night, then check them for tenderness the next day as time permits.
SO i actually really like holodetz I havent had it for a while because my grandmother wss making it for my visit and then had a stroke so i just cant still. For me spinach quiche is the worse food or creamed spinach. Once i was at a chess tournament where that was served for a wèek for dinner. Also olives hate the texture
My Austrian Grandmother used pig snouts and pig kidneys. Same idea soak, soak cook for a day. Before it hit the jello stage she would grind it fine. She would cut it like cake and serve on buttered rye bread. I loved it until I was there during the cleaning-first boil stage. OMGoodness! The stench! Thank you for the good laugh!
My maternal lineage makes something similar as they raised pigs for many years. Well, they were a family hog farm until my generation. I still get a hankering for pork bbq grilled outside by my uncles and aunts once a year but not the ‘potted’ meat. My dogs think the ‘potted’ meat and the venison sticks made by my cousins are heavenly treats.
That kind of looks like cat food…
Bummer about your kids with apple and pork, that’s a really common combination. Maybe it’s a British colonies type thing where roasts are more typical meals. Kids can be funny about food they’re not accustomed to.
Cooking in my family’s home was pretty minimal and bland when it happened, though I do remember not liking parsley as a kid. My sister dared me to eat the garnish when we were out for a family dinner once and I thought it was the grossest thing ever. After that everyone made jokes about feeding me ‘parsley soup’ and ‘parsley burgers’. It’s an herb I don’t mind in moderation, but when someone lumps a heap of it on a soup or in a pasta I’m just like ‘Why did you make something good so inedible…’
Reconstituted powdered milk and hard boiled eggs. We traveled by car a lot when I was very young, and these made it eat to feed young ones with minimal refrigeration. Just the smell of reconstituted milk makes me gag, wild horses coulnt drag me to taste it! Can eat hardboiled eggs if truly desperate,
but have to be really, really desperate
Yes, v. I grew up drinking real cow milk fresh that day so to me grocery store whole milk tastes like chalk and bland and ‘dry’ milk makes me gag even when reconstituted in hot chocolate. Such a waste of good chocolate.
I agree about store bought hard boiled eggs as they are so bland and blah but I love hard boiled eggs I make from the eggs produced by my free range hens.
Powdered milk was a camping thing. It smells awful, I can’t believe anyone expected us to drink it. I ate my cereal dry! I grew up drinking 2% milk. We visited family who owned a farm when I was around 4. They were so proud to serve me “real” milk for breakfast – fresh from the cow. I would have preferred the powder. Warm and high fat… that milk was.. 40 yrs later and I still shudder at the thought.
Liver? No problem. The way my Dad makes it is delicious.
What makes me absolutely gag is steamed spinach and fried eggs. Smell and texture was enough to make me throw up as a kid.
Bitter melon! Growing up in an Asian family, the adults always lectured us about the health benefits of bitter melon. I’d have to choke down as much of the bumpy green gourd as I could before the nauseating, overwhelming bitterness coated my mouth. Oh & durian. The taste is alright but nothing in this world is worth withstanding the stench!
Same here! I detest bitter melon with a vengeance, and it was practically a staple when I was growing up because my dad loves it.
As for slow-cooked pig trotters in cold jelly, that sounds deliciousーand it’s actually pretty nutritious, full of collagen. I live in the tropics, and often slow cook trotters and hocks, along with various veggies, of course. And the nights are sometimes so warm that I don’t bother reheating the food after taking it out of the ref. The cold meat jelly is a treat in hot weather.
My mother cooked the best baby beef liver and onions….a lot of cooks cook the heck out of it. Rationing went on in England into the early 50’s so you ate what was given to you. We also had head cheese. That jellied dish…would it be similar to bone marrow soup? Had some in Hong Kong and it was delish!!!
Chicken Divan. So gross, it is basically boiled chicken, boiled broccoli smothered with Hellman’s mayo and baked. I gag thinking about it.
Made with leftover roasted chicken and steamed broccoli with a seasoned sauce and it can be delicious.
Yeah, that sounds gross, but I loved it. My mom always made it from scratch, so it’s basically an béchamel/alfredo sauce. My uncle once looked at my aunt after eating it and said “why can’t you cook like this?” My aunt’s response was “give me a pound of butter and a quart of cream, and I can make anything taste good, too!” Add in a “little” parmesan cheese? Delicious and sooooo bad for you.
We used to go to German butcher store. It sold head cheese. People would buy a pound cut in thick slices. OMG I shudder just remembering this . The owner kept offering me a slice. I couldn’t even look at it. Hate anything that looks like that or aspic or even jello .
Love cream spinach and pork and apples and most veggies not a fan of okra?. Also pizza with pineapple dont understand that combo.
Hahaha, pizza with pineapple, my youngest son is absolutely outraged at the idea of it ?
Unfortunately, pizza with anything is tasty to me – though I have never tried any of the really exotic flavors like squid, with or without the ink. Plain squid is very good, so I might be fine.
Large yellow “butter beans” from a can, cooked to mush and seasoned with nothing but salt pork (my mother’s recipe, alas) are inedible. Small green limas are fine. Other beans are fine.
The only thing that would make butter beans worse would be to serve them with British bangers. If the sausages are less than 50% fat, I don’t think you can sell them as bangers. I still shudder and it’s been 30 plus years since we lived in London and almost 50 years since I lived at home.
As children, we weren’t allowed to refuse food so I learned to tolerate just about anything, including most of the things in these comments. But I really dreaded rutabagas, which my mom seemed to make all the freaking time. Turnips? Fine. Rutabagas? Wahhhh. (I still had to eat them.) I could also handle liver and onions until my sister made liver burgers for us. It involved chicken livers being put in a blender–and I had to clean the blender. It was unspeakable. I remind her of that atrocity on a regular basis even after all these years.
I’m still fairly flexible, although not as much as I used to be. I have my quirks, and there’s no one to force me to eat things I don’t want. I’ve also been a pescatarian for about 3 decades, so anything meat-related puts me right off. No holodetz for me.
Liver and onions. Pickled herring. Those make me run out of the room and not come back until it’s aired out. My parents and older brother loved pickled herring especially at New Year’s Eve. In my family it’s a German tradition. Gag!
I ate a little bit of liver and onions when I was very little. Then I learned what the liver does and why it has a very metallic taste. I wanted to throw up when my mom cooked liver. I would get teased about it. I always came back with “chickens need to keep their livers”.
By the way, my mom wasn’t German. She learned to love pickled herring from living with my dad’s parents who were from Germany.
My mom was German and loved pickled herring. I still buy jars of it, and just stand up in the kitchen, eating it out of the bottle as a snack. Not very hygienic, I know, but I am the only one who eats it, and I figure the vinegar will kill any germs ? Plus the bottles don’t last very long either…it is a healthy snack. At least that’s what I tell myself.
Oh. I forgot chitlins. Someone else’s mother made them so I had to eat them. It was just the one time, tho. Thank Jesus that we never had them at home. I just got a little shudder thinking about them.
As small children my granny fed us this on white bread and told us it was a goose sandwich. “eat your goosey! She’d tell us. I guess it sounded better than liver. I think it stopped once we could read. Ewww I can not, will not ever, ever eat pate’.
Yes! I can’t stand that either. My older brother would cut a huge chunk, put it on white bread, put some mustard on the bread, and eat it. You could smell his breath clear across the room if the air blew your way. Whew!
My grandmother ate braunschweiger and limburger cheese sandwiches. My brother and i would have to leave the house.
Limburger…. completely forgot about Limburger cheese. As a kid, I’d urge at the smell. Lol….thanks for the memories!
My parents loved braunschweiger and ate it that way, too. They also had a chihuahua who, for the last few years of his life, would only eat braunschweiger.
Corned beef hash–I did a lot of sneezing into a tissue to spit it out discretely so the plate looked empty!!!!
I love vegetables. My mother says I am the only person she knows that gains weight on veges. But okra, gag, and I don’t care how it’s cooked. It had better not be in my soup either. Double gag.
Lutefisk. This is a dried whitefish soaked in lye, rinsed, soaked in water, salted and reheated in water. Who would think using lye could make good food?
Lutefisk is white and is traditionally served with white potatoes a white gravy and/or butter. I did not have to eat it but a friend of mine did and she said she had heartburn for three days afterwards. Rates up there with haggis.
We have a similar dish in Trinidad, its called Souse. It includes both chicken and pig feet, but its eaten warm with the broth.
I hated it. We also have Black Pudding which is a lovely mix of what ever is left of the pig including blood, rolled into a tubular sausage like thing. I ate once and then threw up everywhere. Mom never offered it us after that.
My youngest who is three HATES mashed potatoes. Every time we offer it to him he shivers and gags as if we are poisoning him. He is highly dramatic when it comes to eating and is my only picky eater.
There aren’t many things I hate, but purple cabbage cooked with apples ranks first, with chipped beef in cream sauce coming in a close second.
Natillas. It’s this kind of Spanish creamy custard that triggers my gag reflex every time. Ugh. They’d expect me to eat it in kindergarten and sometimes when visiting family. *shivers* Up to this day even normal custard makes me wary >_<
Liver of any type, asparagus. Never would try chitlins. Any thing that smells so bad you need to cook it outside, I’m not even trying.
Curried liver… it took me 20 years to try eating curry because the thought of it made me want to hurl.
I do enjoy curry now in moderation but not liver.
Haha I will eat almost anything that is curried. I haven’t found a type that I do not enjoy yet.
Chicken jello — when we were kids my father received a copy of the Frugal Gourmet and made one new recipe a weekend. According to the book “the kids will love it”. All five of us hated it!
Two things from childhood- cow tongue and anything with candied fruit in it.
Cow’s tongue was my father’s favorite. We had to suffer through it at least once per year. My grandmother would make it because my mother refused. I think the anticipation was the worst part of it because we knew it was coming. The tongue would sit defrosting in the sink all day.
The candy fruit was a product of getting sick on it on long road trip to my great grandmother’s in Tennessee. It was habit of my parents to leave before dawn and eat both cold breakfast and lunch at road stops along the way. On one trip my dad fed us a fruitcake that done serious time on counter at our house. I remember leaning out of the car and vomitting it up. To this day the thought of candy fruit makes me sick.
As an adult I done a lot of traveling and tried a lot of different things. The one thing I won’t try again is kumus (?) or fermented mares milk. It tastes like how I imagine turpentine does.
Parsnip fritters. Not light, fluffy, golden brown fritters, but one’s that were cooked in oil in an electric skillet and beatened until they were hard, flat discs. My Aunt used to make for Thanksgiving, EVERY Thanksgiving for years! I don’t remember anyone actually eating them. Ugh! ?
Eggplant. Which doesn’t really seem innocuous until you’ve had it bastardized every evening for an entire summer. It was during one of those short lived food fads that went as quickly as it came, but left me scared of anything with shiny purple skin. My mother bought into the fad’s claims that it was “a healthy, meaty veggie” perfect for substituting in dishes with meat, or just sneaking in when the kids weren’t looking. Fun fact: if you don’t cook it right, it has the texture of mushy rubber. The skin will be bitter and as tough as the Hulk, while the inside white meat will be blandly soggy.
We had it every way: roasted, as burgers, in pasta, pasta baked in a layered eggplant shell. And while my mother is normally an astoundingly great cook, eggplant was most definitely her Achilles’ heel. None of us eat it anymore. Too many bad memories.
Ham hock and white bean soup?
okay there is several foods that I don’t like (not going to share them family believed in trying everything). The worst was at a family get together our aunt made jello with a thick white frosting. All of us kids thought it was cool whip, so we dug in. It wasn’t it was miracle whip (mayo) can say all of us kids couldn’t eat jello with cool whip for years, without gagging. 20 years later and anytime she cooks anything that should have cool whip someone has to test it first, before the rest have any. Turned out the jar of mayo broke and they put it in a cool whip container, but none of us have ever forgiven her for it.
I truly feel your pain …. but I am laughing so hard right now….
My aunt just made, with great fanfare, lemon jello with carrot sticks in it. She cut it up, slapped a big spoon of Mayo on each slice and gave a plate to each of us. I could deal with the jello but I scrapped off as much Mayo as I could. I think she was mad at all of us. It was so baaad.
I donat know how they’re allowed to call that stuff in a jar “Mayo”. It resemblea homemade mayonnaise about as much as a cat resembles a dog.
White bread with butter. My mom served it with EVERY dinner. And my parents were of the old school that you had to clean your plate!
The other staple of almost every meal growing up was jello with “floaties”. Usually some sort of canned fruit. Blegh.
I forgot to warn my kids and I laughed so hard when they came home from grandmas just horrified by both! My poor mom. She really is an excellent cook.
Baby squid. I had it in paella and it practically sends me into hysterics now even if it’s on someone else’s plate.
Mid-western fruit salad made with canned fruit, cool whip, and white rice. It’s the white rice that killed me. And I would try anything as a kid. The only thing I ever balked at, my mom made me eat some anyway b/c we were at a family friend’s house for Thanksgiving and the hostess had made. I threw up.
Mine is black eyed peas and stewed tomatoes had them every new years also had spinach but I like that now but black eyed peas and stewed tomatoes still makes me gag blah not as bad as meat jelly I will admit but for some reason it hits my gross button
sushi. All kinds. Raw fish. Gag.
Thought of another one. My mom used to cut zucchini really thin (like cucumber slices), put it in a pan with parmesan cheese and some other stuff and cook it until soft. Used to make me gag. So I’d take the smallest amount I could get away with, then I’d find the sweet spot in the side of my mouth where I could chew without it touching my tongue and tastebuds and I would hold my breath, too.
Life’s too short to spend figuring out how to avoid tasting your food.
Boiled beef tongue. I’ll pass on using the image embed. I don’t remember my age but it was younger than 9, sunday dinner at my maternal grandparents’ place. It was rubbery and horrifying to be able to recognize what it was. And I had to eat some or it was dire consequences.
There is no way I’m going to french a dead, cooked cow ever again.
Sure, it’s probably in hotdogs and other ground processed food, but by god it’s at least pureed into a form that isn’t going to make me want to vomit.
I have two things that will make me gag!
I’m a person that smells my food before I eat it which would drive my mom insane but if it did not smell good it was not going in my mouth. Well one of my moms favorite dishes is salmon casserole ?? she would always ask my grandmother to make it because my dad who was the cook in the family refused. It was canned salmon, eggs, crackers and mayo with spices just the smell of it cooking would make both my dad and myself gag.
The second thing is cottage cheese I can’t get past the curled milk look and when I forced myself to try because it’s suppose to be a healthy snack it I vomited immediately. Ugh ?
Be the way the ones that don’t like okra because it’s slimmy my dad makes a fried okra salad that you might actually enjoy because it’s not slimmy at all. It’s diced fresh tomatoes (you can deseed them if the texture is an issue) chopped fine white onion and then okra that’s been chopped and coated in cornmeal fried crispy (dark brown) then put into a bowl with the tomatoes and onions right out of the fryer and then salt and pepper added while the okra is hot is one of my favorite meals and one of the only ways I’ll eat okra willingly.
The onions and tomatoes are not fried just the okra.
I had a couple of things- my mom used to make this weird cornbread casserole that just …never tasted right. I dreaded it so much that she eventually stopped making it but until then dinner time was an exercise in dinner theater. I still can’t eat creamed corn
Also beets- my dad loves beets and thinks everyone should eat them- he would force several pieces onto my plate but he’s also ADD and consumed his own food as if he’d been starving in the desert so it was usually not a hard thing to get him distracted and then slip my portion onto his plate ( while leaving a suitably squashed piece left on my own to look like it had been munched on) he never did notice and ended up cleaning his plate like he was it’s personal dishwasher.
Also my grandmother- not the greatest cook in the world anyway. She’s scorch oatmeal on the stove and then mix in whatever she had on hand…jelly/ fried eggs/ etc …I couldn’t eat oatmeal for a full 10 years after that experience.
Mint sauce with lamb chops or apple sauce with pork chops are fairly common which is probably where Martha got the idea. If they are anti fruit with meat, wonder how they are about pineapple on Pizza. For me it was Tripe (COW intestines) which my Dad loved and which we always tried to bury at the bottom of the freezer along with the liver and heart. My Mom would always dig it out for him when she wanted to give him something special. As they got older my brother and sister always had some place they had to be on those nights. I being the youngest was as fortunate
As a Chinese diaspora yet born and bred in Indonesia I feel like I had the best of both worlds. I honestly can’t remember anything they forced me to eat that made me gag, aside from Chinese medicines. Those are the worst!
Gudeg, fried rice and noodles, pressure cooked fish in brown sweet and savory broth, pineapple tarts, eggplant in chili… we have the best food in the world.
Aside from PETAI and JENGKOL. They are these smelly things Indonesians love to eat. And when they eat DURIAN and then fart and burp at each other like it’s some kind of game. No other country in the world has citizens that is proud they can eat smelly things. If you eat those things, you’re not coming in my house, you’re not getting inside my car, you’re not using my toilet. GTFO.
Холодець!!!!!! Я была в питере а я помью когда моя “хост мама” готовила холодець. Правда! Очень отвратительно!
Three words: liver and onions
Cottage cheese – it looks and smells like something that was freshly hurled from the human digestive system.
Chitterlings-they smell like they taste, they held piggy poop before being cooked for human consumption.
Boiled hot dogs & Vienna Sausages – totally disgusting…even mustard can’t hide the taste.
Canned “Italian-style” zucchini. First, we ate nearly all our veggies in a can. I didn’t really encounter normal veggies until high school or college. This zucchini was so very soft and translucent, it makes me grimace just writing about it. Then it has stewed tomatoes (another hated food), Italian spices, and that’s probably it but that’s enough. My folks had a rule that you had to at least try a food and if you didn’t like it you didn’t have to eat it thereafter. Liars! I had to eat some every time Mom made it. Same with cottage cheese with fruit (canned, again) on top of it. I liked cottage cheese just fine, with enough salt on top of it. I don’t even much like fresh zucchini and such is just wrong.
Boiled codfish and potatoes. *GAG* Its a staple where I’m from… A place inhabited by crazy people with mutant taste buds. You soak salted codfish in water overnight, and then boil it with potatoes the next morning and eat it for breakfast. Yes, breakfast. Imagine, if you will, the most rank, disgusting smell you can and that is the lovely aroma that’s supposed to spark your appetite while this is boiling away. To top it off, my parents liked to serve it with stewed tomatoes, my most feared and hated vegetable nemesis. Sorry but for me this tops your (admittedly horrid sounding) aspic.
Heh, Portugal?
The look & taste of Magiritsa – a Greek Easter soup made from lamb offal – it still makes me gag.
Also tripe.
Coconut water and raw tomatoes. Both cause instant gag reflex. My body just rejects them. I can look at sliced tomatoes and think “oh those look like they should be good” but the minute I try it is coming right back out. Coconut water everyone was pushing me to try as an electrolyte option, it is projectile expulsion worthy according to my body.
This may sound like a simple dish but a standard lettuce, tomato, and cucumber salad with salad shrimp added to it. I absolutely hate shellfish and shrimp is by far my least favorite type. I’m not real good with other seafood either but if it is cooked right will at least eat it. I will also eat a salad without the shrimp but my mom expected us to eat the shrimp salad about once a month.
My folks were pretty good about not forcing us to eat things we didn’t like. But the school cafeteria was another story. I will never forget the day in fourth grade that they decided to serve vegetable lasagna. It was a greenish white with broccoli sticking out. I think most of it went in the trash and we all went hungry that day. Fortunately they never tried that one again.
I’ve actually eaten the meat jello thing! It was a huge accident in judgment. It was an appetizer we ordered and neglected to see that it was cold. We tried muscling through it and half way through my friend said she just couldn’t do it and i said thank God because I can’t either.
I think the worst thing I ate was called fugah. I’m not actually sure what it’s called in English or even regular Chinese because my family is Jamaican Chinese and everything is a little bastardized. It’s bitter melon hollowed out and you stuff ground meat into it and cook it. There’s seasoning involved but when you eat it, all you get is this intensely bitter flavor. It permeates the meat. Not gag worthy, but i can’t even smell it without cringing.
I love it…all of these different foods, and I almost feel like following half of you around and offering to relieve you of your plates….(I ADORE fried calf’s liver and onions, sushi, okra, pork w/apple, beef tongue, beef heart…..all kinda stuff. Our family, we even love eggnog, snails, and braunschweiger!)
What do I hate? Chicken Livers in ANY form; and those freaky jello molds that included diced celery, and were topped with artistic swirls of Hellman’s Mayonnaise.
These stupid Jello molds were made SO much worse because I adore jello desserts, and this crap would inevitably get stuck in with the desserts at our church potlucks.
As everyone knows, it is a universal rule, that if you skip over a dish, the nasty bat who made it will be Standing. Right. There….and she will report you to your mother….who will, with a COMPLETELY straight face, claim that you skipped it because you thought it had whipped cream, and then scoop you up a nice big bowlful, because “she’d be so upset if she missed it!”
It is amazing to me that more serial killers do not attribute their behaviour to the scars left by the monthly church potluck.
That looks almost exactly like Fancy Feast cat food. I bet my cats would have loved it.
I vote for okra. The rest of my family loves it. Mom brought some home from the farmers market this weekend and was so happy. More for her I guess.
Hamburgers made with beef and large pieces of chopped celery. Memorable, in all the worst ways.
Growing up, my mother did not like to cook. When she “innovated”, it seemed like a revenge motivated session of iron chef (in that your stomach needed to made of cast iron).
Calf’s liver. My mother and her husband loved it. Even just writing about it makes my gag reflex sit up and take notice. It was always a battle of wills between her husband and me because he believed you didn’t leave the table until you ate everything on the plate, and of course my mom would serve me a slab of liver. So I sat. And sat, and sat. Often until 3:00 in the morning, when my mom finally gave up, got out of bed and sent me to my room. I didn’t care that I was half asleep and had a growling stomach, I was not going to eat it. The smell alone made me want to puke and the taste guaranteed a vomit session. I was spanked for flushing it down the toilet, sneaking it to the dog, hiding it in my shoes, etc. I gladly took the punishment.
When I finally moved in with my dad as a young teen, it was awesome. He hated liver as much as I did, so I knew I’d never have to deal with it again. I’m not really a picky eater. Had durian and jellyfish salad, squirrel stew, fried armadillo and rattlesnake. Alligator tail on a stick is good eats. But liver…no way.
I think the thing I found most disappointing about the dinner from hell was the deceptiveness of it. I’d walk into the house, and it was redolent with bacon and onions, then I’d discover it was liver being cooked with and ruining all that goodness. Disappoint and then dread over what would inevitably be a very long suppertime. 🙂
I hated live as a child but thankfully my parents didn’t make me eat it and i’d get sausages instead. As an adult I now like calf or pigs liver but keep away from Ox liver as it is too strong tasting. I think liver is that strong in flavour it is too much for a lot of kids
I had the exact same experience with my stepdad (who was otherwise a cool guy and taught me to eat all kinds of things I never imagined I would). He and my mom LOVED liver. The first time he cooked it and insisted I eat it, I warned him that I would throw up. He didn’t believe me. I took a bite and promptly threw up all over the table. Honestly, I didn’t do it on purpose – I could not have controlled that gag reflex no matter what I did.
He never made me eat liver again LOL.
We got home one night late and hungry. In a rush to make something to eat, Dad made liver and sourkraut. It was actually pretty decent, but he and I were the only ones who would touch it. It really did look and smell disgusting.
Same here, Liver hater all the way. My dad would made me sit at the table for hours, and if I did not eat it at dinner, I had to have it for breakfast the next morning. That was until I got sick and lost my cookies all over the dinner table. My mom finally convinced my dad that it wasn’t worth it. Till this day I can’t even abide the smell of it.
I feel bad for u! I never ate liver growing up (thought it looked like poop) but as an adult i found some nice recipes for chicken liver i can eat… Never will be my favorite
The trotters jelly you described is very similar to a traditional Indo/Pak recipe (Paiy) that my husband and kids love, but I hate, and refuse to cook. It’s served hot, though, not cold, and made with goat or beef feet. There’s less soaking involved in the cleaning process (it would go bad if left to stand overnight in that climate) but traditional recipes call for burning the hair and skin on the feet, as feet can come unskinned from the butcher. When it’s cooking, the smell spreads through the entire house, and coats everything. Even after it’s cooked, every plate it’s been eaten in stinks of it.
When I was a kid I hated eggplant. Really didn’t like the sliminess of it. Every time my mom cooked it and saw me picking at it (raised Chinese so we were expected not only to finish our plates, but ideally finish every dish on the table) she would tell me, “When I was your age I hated eggplant too, but my dad made me eat it and now I love it!” I would nod and try not to gag.
Now that I’m an adult I..don’t hate eggplant but don’t love it. I won’t order it on my own but won’t turn it down, I enjoy a few bites, but always with a feeling of “Dammit! My mom was kinda right!” She would be so smug if she knew…
Heh… we have a friend who is Egyptian. We were out for dinner one night at a Lebanese restaurant and he said “let me order”. He muar have mentioned in the past about his hatred for eggplant because when he ordered babaganouh, I said “You know that’s eggplant, right”? He was adamant that it wasn’t, saying “my mother knows I hate eggplant, there is no way she would have served this to me growing up if it was eggplant!”. Me: “ok, but I’ve made it at home and the recipe calls for eggplant”. He ended up calling the owner over and asking. His face when he realized that his mother had been feeding him eggplant all of those years was priceless! Lol
My herbalist/organic aunt brought us dinner one time when my mom was in the hospital. I was probably 8 years old. She called it a broccoli cheese casserole. I’ve had many dishes called by that name since and they’ve all been wonderful. This was……. I still don’t know what or how she did to it. All I know was you had to saw a piece out and once removed it stayed in a perfect cube on your plate. And it was truly vile. I don’t remember the details beyond that now but I remember the trauma.
As an adult the worst thing I’ve eaten was a regional delicacy (having since read Terry Pratchett I know know those code words should have warned me) served to me by my hostess on my study abroad in Caen France. It was a sea snail probably a little bigger than a golf ball, complete w barnicles on the shell. And they boiled it in brine. Normal escargot isn’t too terrible. Little chewy. Tastes like garlic. This, giant, Thing was probably the size of a chicken nugget by the time you pulled it all the way out of its shell. And you had to pop it in your mouth whole and chew. And chew. And chew. And chew. Bc it was too big to just swallow with out choking and it was so chewy it was like gnawing a hunk of rubber. And the taste…. you know that fish smell? The kind that walks up and slaps you across the face at like a traditional Asian market? They concentrated that smell down until it had substance and was nearly visible. And I had to chew it forever. It almost didn’t make it down. But I didn’t want to be rude bc I adored my hostess so it stayed down and I will never, ever do that again.
I very much relate, to this (and the Pratchett reference is particularly lovely). Yes, I have endured a similar sea snail as part of a French seafood platter (oysters, crayfish, tiny brown shrimp periwinkle, sea urchin etc. – all yum). The big sea snails (I understand that they are a type of whelk – bulot in French – although I think of them not so much as a whelk, but as a ‘Why??!!’ Photo is included) were the most vile version of a Willy Wonka Everlasting Chewing Gum (Roald Dahl) that I can imagine: the gastronomic epitome of the Law of Diminishing Returns….
I feel your pain.
Sadly, any chewy or – in Chinese terms ‘texture’ – food, falls into a similar category for me. Tripe, jellyfish, chicken feet etc. All a no. Other than that, I will happily eat most things ?.
Had a similar experience with smoked eel in Japan. I dont eat fish on a good day but they insisted it was amazing, insisted it would taste different and insisted I had to try it. I was gagging and had to grab a napkin and spit it out. Thankfully they found it amusing vs offensive but I still start to feel ill just thinking about it nearly ten years later ?
Not just the taste (muddy, fermented fish) but also the texture! *shudders*
I am not a picky eater, so I will eat most anything, but when I was in elementary school I used to bring those Chewy granola bars to school in my lunch. I went to a really tiny school with only 7 girls in my class, and for whatever reason they all thought Chewy bars were the bomb, so every day I would split them 7 ways. The rest of my lunch was also basically inedible because my mom would make ramen and then split it into two thermoses, one for me and one for my sister, and my sister always got all broth and I always got just a large chunk of noodles.
So I used to have a 1/7 chewy bar for lunch every day for about 2 years and haven’t eaten them since. Not so much a disgusting thing as looking at them just makes me feel sad for my younger self!
The worst thing I had as an adult was one of those pineapple flavored beer drinks? Like a can of alcohol wth a low APV like beer, but flavored to be pineapple. It was nasty and I haven’t had anything pineapple flavored since (pineapple juice and real pineapple is fine).
I used to quite like my parent’s stir fries but my brother and I still remember the time that minted peas were added…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggs_and_brains How one of the worse foods in the world could have its own wiki page…I know not…only that my mother attempted to have me eat it…with poke salad..which did not help…
I grew up with German and Polish country people. What you pictured and described was called Sulz (Sultz?) Gotta agree – Ugh! That and Blood Soup would send me running and staying away from the kitchen until I knew it was gone. Shiver. Never tried to feed my son anything too odd and, because of that, our rule in the house was you have to at least try something before you decide you don’t like it. We would then respect your choices. It really helped us avoid the food drama. Of course, any overly rude comments would have resulted in Mom (me) giving the critic kitchen duty. ?The Cook gets respect in the kitchen, whoever does the cooking!
Ugh…we had something similar when I grew up except Mom called it head cheese. Revolting! Same thing..offal in jelly. I can remember laughing when Mom asked my newest brother in law would like a hrad cheese sandwich. It was very amusing to watch him politely say no.
Mom also loved to make tomato aspic at xmas which was basically jellied tomato sauce. BLEURK! I was also revolting. Noticing a gelatine theme?
OMG tomato aspic! My grandmother used to make it and it was awful! After a few years I told myself I could handle it and ended up sitting there with my mouth full of the stuff (I’d only taken a little bite) and every time I swallowed it crawled back up my throat!
I’ve since had canned aspic and it was delicious! Gran apparently used too much gelatin and not enough tomato (shudder).
Oh, golly, split pea soup in any incarnation: out of a can, homemade, gourmet — it all makes me shudder and gag. Ditto tomato soup; just the smell makes me nauseous.
I also abhor nuts slyly secreted in smooth things like jello salads and ice cream. My parents were big Rocky Road ice cream people which broke my child heart: so alluring, that chocolate ice cream with the fudge ripple and the marshmallows … chock full of bitter walnut pieces and no way to avoid them.
As a child we went to dinner at friends of my parents. A big roast was brought to the table and unveiled. It gave me nightmares for weeks. I can’t kill anything (except flies and mosquitoes).
Holy crap! I can’t seem to zoom in … but is that a horse head or a cow head? Either way, I think I’d be eating salad and/or blowing chunks. My sympathies.
It looks like goat to me. We used to raise goats and my parents sold the babies off to be eaten. They told us they were sent to a farm. I’m so happy I didn’t know any better until I was an adult! We did eat my sisters rabbits. Yum. Her kids were angry and sad for years when they found out!
Your horrifying Russian meat gelatin sounds like home-made SPAM… which I also wouldn’t eat.
The worst thing for me was liver. My mom liked it o.k., but my stepdad *really* liked liver and onions.
It tastes weird and has a disgusting, texture. I can remember them telling me that it was steak, in an effort to head off the drama. I was about 8 years old and told them (approximately), “Ugh! This steak is awful!; it tastes like liver!!!” I was told that I would sit at the table until I ate it. I think they gave up a while past bed time.
I have since learned that the liver is the organ that filters out poisons, and often stores them in concentrated form. Definitely not on my list of things to eat. Yes, it’s possible that I would feel differently if I was starving. But even without food, I am several months from starving, and liver is a “last resort” sort of meal. Blech!
As a mom, my mantra has been something along the lines of, “If you don’t like it, you can fix yourself something or go hungry tonight”. I figured that my kids are generally well-nourished, and if they actually went hungry, they probably legitimately didn’t like it. Fair enough.
What you call holodetz in my country (Romania) is name piftie, also a winter food, on cristhmas and new year. I like it :)).
An ‘honor’ dinner when visiting Native people in Costa Rica in 1978(notice I’m still traumatized almost 40 years later)… In honor of our visit a local dish of monkey hand soup was offered to me! To make it worse they had a visible pile of mutilated monkey bodies on the way to the dinner. And the final nail in the coffin of that meal was that the hands – about the size of the hand of a 3yr old – were whole and floating in the soup! The connective tissue had contracted while cooking so they looked like little hands begging for help..
I understood clearly that it would be impossible to refuse to eat it… so I was in trouble! Thankfully, my dinner neighbor took pity on me and ate the ‘hands’ placing the bones beside my dish so no one knew… I gagged down the soup with a smile and thanks! I’ve never looked at monkeys the same!
That meat jelly as you call it is called šaltiena in Lithuanian. And it is one of my favourite foods. Especially with hot potatoes, horse radish or vinegar. It is heavenly food.
My worst childhood food was tomato soup with rice. It was disgusting with fat floating on the top and overcooked rice mush. Yuck. I still can’t eat tomato soup to this day.
Cod’s roe. The memory of its taste can make me gag at the thought 40 years later. Was served at my auntie’s house. My cousins ate it happily and went to watch the telly. I ate tiny pieces and spat them out in paper napkins…took forever!
Don’t remember what it looked like, but internet helpfully provided an image. It is supposed to be sliced into rounds once cooked.
Haha, I remember that stuff, my Mum never cooked it. It was a strange texture wasn’t it.
Well known is the popular British fish and chips, less well known was my Dad’s favourite alternative whenever we went to the seaside when I was a child – faggots and chips – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faggot_(food).
http://welshicons.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FaggotsNew.jpg
He forced all of us to try these lumps of ground offal from hell nearly every time we went. *shudders*
Salmon loaf, with canned salmon and canned peas in it. Gross. Mom didn’t like to cook and my Dad complained about having the same thing every week…, meatloaf on Mondays, Spagetti on Tuesdays, Chilli on Wednesdays……. So to do something different, she made salmon loaf from a recipe she for in a magazine, probably Better Homes and Garden. It was different alright. It was awful and none of us would eat it. It really hurt Mom’s feelings because the cat wouldn’t even eat it. She threw it in the garbage, which NEVER happened at our house with food. To make up with Mom, because she cried,as,she,dumped it, Dad took us out for chinese so it turned out ok.
Hey, looks like good quality cat food to me 🙂
Boiled okra and squash casserole. They were both nasty slimy, yeeck.
Brussels sprouts. I had never eaten one until I was 9 as their awful smell made me gag – that should have been the warning, My dad was a bit of a softie and never really played the heavy dad over food, so I always just left them on the plate. Then one day, I must have done something to really anger my dad, because it was “you won’t get down from the table until you’ve eaten your brussels sprouts”. After a 2 hour stand-off (or should that be sit-off?) I ate half of one. The results were interesting, to say the least, as it turns out I’m violently allergic to brussels sprouts. The following day, as they brought me home from hospital, he told me and my mum he hated them as well, but had been made to eat them by his dad, so he just eat them when mum served them. Needless to say, mum has never cooked another brussels spout since.
My mom decided it would be a good idea to make rice crispy with lima beans. She was always putting weird food combinations together. That one was by far the worst.
When money was tight, Mom would though together a lovely meal of ground meat, ketchup & elbow macaroni. I feel green thinking about it.
(Beef) Liver and onions. Both of my parents LOVED liver and onions and insisted that we eat our share before leaving the table. My Dad wasn’t one to mess with, so you ate the liver and onions. I will NEVER do that to my children.
chickens feet…. yuk, yuk, yuk.
My in laws are from Hong Kong and in Melbourne Australia Yum Cha every Sunday serves up delicious dumplings and disgusting chickens feet. Bleh, shudder. I ate them once and never again.
Phoenix claw! In red sauce! Oh my God I miss it. We moved to the Midwest and have yet to find a decent pizzeria in the four years we’ve been here, never mind authentic Cantonese food.
Was in Ecuador and got no more than 1/3 the way into my soup and there’s the chicken feet, poking up at me! It was a local restaurant in a poorer part of Quito and so I felt pretty ashamed at myself for being so picky. Took me a minute of deep breathing but I swallowed my gag reflex, pushed them to the side of the bowl and kept eating. It was a nice soup but yeah, scrappy feet.
Pig’s heads as part of a Fijian Lovo with my grandmother also rate up on that list, especially for my ‘whitey’ husband!
There is a traditionnal Algerian food which consists of zucchini and potatoes filled with minced meat. You cut the potatoes and zucchini, empty the halss a little so you can put the meat here, and it’s actually pretty good once it’s good.
Except when my aunt decided to cook a variant when she was at our place.
I opened the pot to see a sea of brown green, which was actually mashed zucchini and minced meat, agglutinated in something strange. The sauce had soldered everything together. I remember refusing to eat eat. I kissed my aunt on the cheek and straight up refused. Others were more polite.
They spend the night awake as their stomach screamed at them while I slept like a baby.
Runner up: My mother was distracted from the soup cooking over a campfire. It burnt. Mom said we didn’t have to eat it. We put the worst burnt bits into a bowl for my stepfather who didn’t show up in time for dinner. We stopped him but he actually intended to eat it.
Worst meal; it was supposed to be a tomato based soup. Imagine stew vegetables in tomato soup. Did I mention that at least one of the tomatoes must have been green? We tried to eat it. My brother’s attempt was the tipping point where my mother lost her temper. He was straining the tomato base back into the bowl and eating the veggies.
btw look up some American foods during the Jello craze.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/17-horrifyingly-disgusting-retro-gelatin-recipes
My Dads family is Hispanic, on New Years Eve, it’s traditional to eat a bowel of menudo.? It’s tripe, cow intestine, in this spicy hot liquid, absolutely disgusting! Also cows head, barbocoa, which isn’t bad as long as you didn’t see the head and ate the “meat cheek ” in a taco, my dad would eat the eyes and brain, double barf!!!!
Your holiday dish looks scarily like cat food lol
Scrambled pork brains. My Granny considered it a delicacy. No wonder I’m vegan. This would have been in the early 1960s. I don’t think (hope) anyone eats them anymore. But they were available in the grocery store meat case.
Cherry Jello with shredded cheddar cheese mixed into it. Makes the Jello slimy (even more so), and chunky. And you can’t pick the cheese out, it flakes out in little bitty tiny pieces all over the Jello. It always amazed me how you could take two perfectly acceptable ingredients and ruin them by pairing them together. Blech.
Bananas! It took literally years for my family to figure out that I had a reaction every time I ate bananas. I put an end to that when I was four – I ate three when my grandmamma was napping, and barfed all over the house. Stopped eating them. A couple of years later some well-meaning church lady had me try her banana pudding. Barfed in the church gathering room several times. Following that debacle, our family doctor explained that there is a small group of people who cannot digest bananas and to knock it off. Melons give me much the same reaction. Barf EVERYWHERE.
Ketchup sandwiches.
Yup. Just ketchup on plain old white bread. To this day I cannot buy a bottle of ketchup. Packets in a box, no problem. But I will break out in a cold sweat if I try to reach for a bottle….. And I only eat wheat bread now too.
Try it (or don’t) with mashed potatoes spread on one piece of the bread. Depression era staple according to my parents (along with plain ketchup sandwiches)…
Gefilte Fish. I still shudder. What’s more strange is that my cousin married a very nice, non-Jewish guy from Georgia. He loved the stuff.
Lol! U just need a better recipe! I have a great one i make every week as im jewish but i do agree some can be terrible. I never eat my moms… She boils it in sugar water and its like wet sugary mush. I bake mine w spices so it firms up and its great!
I think that meat dish you ate as a child is how Spam was invented! And whenever I hear Pork Chops I always think of the scene from the Brady Bunch “Pork Chops and Apple Sauce” so your creation actually sounds yummy to me!
Worse dish for me was a casserole we had to eat at the end of the month when we were stretching food. It was kind of a kitchen clear out. It consisted of Mac n cheese, canned tuna, canned mushroom soup, peas, and carrots. I’ve created versions since with canned tuna or canned mushroom soup, that are actually tasty. But never combine those two ingredients!
My family had big get-togethers for New Year’s (and other times of the year). New Year’s Mom and Dad, if we hosted, made chicken salad and ham salad for sandwiches. I would have to help ‘make it’. To this day, the smell of mayonnaise, relish and boiled eggs makes me nauseous. I cannot stand the taste, sight or smell of any salad sandwich.
Second on the list, liver of any sort. The smell and taste make me gag.
Lutefisk…. My Mother’s parents came from Sweden and she remembered it from her childhood.
Soooo, for Christmas one year, she found a recipe, special ordered the salted fish, in another city,
and prepared it. If I remember correctly, preparation was very complicated. It was jellied fish.
Poor dear, no one enjoyed it.
She never prepared it again
The worst thing I was ever forced to eat by my ever loving mother and grandmother was RAW LIVER! Apparently, it would do me the world of good and cure my pernicious anaemia. How wrong could they be! Naturally it made me throw up all over the kitchen, but they still insisted I eat some more to try and keep it down. Never worked. This was done on a weekly basis for many months until my horrified doctor told them to stop it.
Then they decided that a pint of Stout would do the trick. Hideous stuff, I still can’t drink Guinness to this day! What were they thinking, giving alcohol to a 4yr old! Completely insane, the pair of them!
Okay did anyone else look at the picture (before reading anything) and think why is she posting pictures of cat food? I’m so sorry that you were forced to eat that, not sure I’d feed it to my cats (though they would probably like it…)
I seriously thought that picture of holodetz was catfood when I saw it. Gag!
When I was a kid, the gross thing was Scrapple:
Scrapple, also known by the Pennsylvania Dutch name Pannhaas or “pan rabbit”, is traditionally a mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and wheat flour, often buckwheat flour, and spices. The mush is formed into a semi-solid congealed loaf, and slices of the scrapple are then pan-fried before serving.
Fried liver and onions served with spinach boiled in vinegar. My mother would serve it once a year on Halloween, and we would have to eat it before we could go trick-or-treating. Thankfully, she would serve it with mashed potatoes and would casually look away, allowing us to bury a portion of the vile combo. It was so nice when I got to be older, and could stay home giving out the treats. All the chocolate I wanted, no liver and spinach.
I started cooking at a really young age out of self-preservation. My mother learned eventually how to cook, but who can screw up stew? She would brown the meat in so much lard( not shortening) and pour it all into the pot to make the gravy. When you ate it, the fat would congeal on the top of your mouth. I would scrape it off with my thumb nail and show her or I’d still be sitting there not eating it. My tummy is doing flip-flops just thinking about it.
For those that can’t stomach liver- I sympathize. She couldn’t cook that to be edible either. I have, however, found the way to cook it so it’s not horrible. If you soak it in milk for at least an hour before dredging( and I use Italian seasoning and chipotle chill in my dredge), only lightly fry it, and top it with chopped tomatoes that have been sautéed in butter and Italian seasoning it is almost palatable.
Your kids must be crazy. OF COURSE apples and pork chops go together. I can’t eat pork chops without applesauce.
Well, the liver was awful, but if you cut it real small, and coated it with ketchup, you could swallow without it touching your tongue… now, the worst was (beef) tongue. I can still see it, staring at me , knowing I will gag.
Ecchhhh!
Your Russian dish sounds almost identical to Scottish Potted Hough, I didn’t love it but I’d eat it when I was young. FYI: Hough means shin in Scottish.
But I couldn’t stand rice pudding, it felt slimy going down. I was 8 years old and at school lunch and they forced me to eat rice pudding and stewed rhubarb. Someone stood over me until I finished, I didn’t like the rhubarb either. It stayed down for a minute then it came back up.
Needless to say they NEVER foreced me to eat all my lunch again LOL.
Nothing too bad. My grandma had us eat grapefruit and drink a glass of whole milk with breakfast. Gave me an upset stomach every time. I haven’t eaten grapefruit since.
Your picture reminds me of SPAM. A lot of the foods that turn people off were / are the cheapest cuts of meat. When folks are poor they’ll fry it, salt it, do whatever to try to make it palatable. It’s food though and nothing goes to waste.
I’ve been a vegan for 30+ years now and I know the BDH will vehemently disagree with me but when I walk into our corner deli and they are frying bacon I find the smell atrocious. I try to breathe through my mouth only and make my purchases as fast as possible!
Let’s face it – we’re lucky to have the choice to eat what we want. A great slideshow on What the World Eats. Look at picture 5 – what a family in Chad eats for a week and then at #7 USA.
http://time.com/8515/what-the-world-eats-hungry-planet/
Most memorable for was when my grandfather died and while mom flew state-side to attend to things, dad cooked dinner. Tuna from can, cooked macaroni, campbells tomato soup, peas and mayo. Don’t remember if we were forced to eat it all but, boy, did mom hear about it when we got back. Next time she left, she gave me money to do the shopping and cooking.
To be honest, nothing comes to mind.
I think my parents were so traumatized by crap they had to eat growing up that they spoiled me and my sister when it came to food. We still had to eat some food we didn’t like, but nothing that compares to that pig’s foot dish. How in the world is there any nutrients left after all that boiling and washing?
PS – They weren’t really “traumatized”, but you’d think so by the way they talk about and for how many times they made a point of telling us.
My dad occasionally experimented in the kitchen. It’s been 26 years and we still vividly remember the abhorrent smell of cucumbers and parmesan added to hot tomato and vegetable soup.
It’s metallic, fills the house and we couldn’t get the food to our mouths; the visceral reaction was just too strong.
I had to eat this horrible holodets every holiday too. Ugh! Yuck! My extended family still makes it and puts it out every holiday meal. My husband who is American, saw it one day and asked me what it was. I explained it to him. You should have seen his face! I think he had nightmares for the next two weeks. 😉 The other thing I hate is the yogurt drink, not kefir, don’t remember the name it now. But it is disgusting!
I think I know the drink you mean. Slightly, salty, frothy natural yogurt? I’ve had it a quite like it. I think it’s refreshing. In Turkey they call it iran and in India they call it lassi. I don’t know what it’s called elsewhere but it seems to be pretty international.
I’m another fan of ayran – though a lot of people like it sweet and not salty. (Me… after I’ve spent half the day on a bus with iffy AC? Gimme.)
Of course, Turkish food generally.
I hate holodets as well, but I think that you should not have skipped the fish version! It’s even worse, I mean a cold fish jelly! Thankfully I don’t have to eat that anymore, but it’s there on the table on New Year.
Oops. Spelled “ayran” wrong. Actually couldn’t remember how to spell it so I wrote it phonetically.
Hey, I’ve written various Turkic languages in three totally different writing systems. Spelling is *so* arbitrary. (Especially with roman characters, where there just aren’t enough characters for the number of sounds you’re trying to represent. Though modern Turkish does a nice job of throwing in extras. English is just special that way.)
Brains on bread. Not sure what kind of brains, but it was sooo disgusting. I wasn’t really forced to eat it as a child, it was more an accident. We went to Hungary on vacation, driving there with a bus (from Germany, where I live). At a stop on the way we were hungry and went to a small diner. They have weird letters in Hungary, so we had no idea what the food was. We saw bread with what we believed to be lard on it. It seemed safe, so we bought it. Unfortunately it was not lard. It tasted awful, and then someone told us it was brains! I felt like puking. Stil shuddering at the memory.
That defininately should win the prize.
I’m from SC (51 y.o.) and I remember as a child seeing my dad eat sheep or cow brains like that. Or with grits. Just thinking of it still makes me gag.
He also ate similar, cringe worthy “delicacies” from various other animals and reptiles. But he grew up in extreme poverty so they survived as best they could. He hunted and trapped.
I live in the south and one of the things people love to eat that I can not bring my self to eat is Chitlins. If you do not know what that is, it is boiled then fried pig intestines. There is even a festival for them here in South Carolina – needless to say you can smell when you are getting close – about 2 miles out.
There are two other things that I can not eat or smell with out loosing it: Canned Salmon, that my mother made into patties while I was growing up ( I think I ate them with about a 1/2 bottle of ketchup) and bulk sausage. Not SPAM, bulk sausage, you buy it in the canned meat area of the store right next to the pig brains. My husband loves both meats with eggs. Needless to say when we started to live together I nipped that particular dish in the bud – quickly.
You won’t like the parts of a cow that sweetbreads come from then, lol.
I know right! That is a very misleading name for the primary ingredients!!
Speaking of SPAM, does anyone really like that stuff. Imported to the UK during WW2, I think that stuff was invented for school dinners as we seemed to have SPAM fritters every other day. As if coating it in thick batter would make it taste any better. I think that powers that be even tried to fool us with a generic product called pork luncheon meat – sounds posh but it still tastes like SPAM.
Spam is pretty popular in Hawaii. I went to a Costco on Maui and saw pallets of it – in 5 different flavors!
I didn’t buy any.
I lived on Oahu in the 1990’s. Spam was very popular. If I remember correctly, it was on the menu at McDonald’s!
Heh… there is starred Michelin restaurant in Hong Kong called “Bo Innovation” that has a sort of mousse served in a baby food jar. Spam and Eggs… I was so very tempted to start in with the Monthy Python skit… “Spam”. “But I don’t like Spam…”
Hahaha. I’d forgotten about the Monty Python take on SPAM. It’s a good job the McDonald’s franchise in the UK knows better than to put SPAM on the menu – I think there’d be a riot.
Did you know that the term “spam” for the countless unwanted emails people get was inspired by that skit? “Spam.spam.spam.spam…” lol
Really. That’s so droll.
I spent 2 weeks on a cultural exchange in Japan at the age of 13. My host father spoke very little English but took great pleasure in offering me the most bizarre foods he could find with a proclamation of “Challenge!”
We went grocery shopping one day and he took a glop of what appeared to be chunky red salsa. He slapped it into my hand and challenged me to try it.
Whatever it was… it wasn’t salsa. Maybe if the tomatos were rotten and mixed with a healthy dose of wasabi (which I despise). He is lucky I didn’t throw up on his shoes. Gah.
My first rule of traveling is that with basically three exceptions (eyes, brains, and drugs) I will try any food or drink once. But I have to know what it is first.
The worst food we had regularly were turkey pot pies… nasty, salty, chemically microwaved turkey pot pies that we had an endless supply of thanks to my dad working for the company that made them.
I actually liked liver and a lot of things that are traditionally difficult for picky people. The things I don’t like tend to be really popular, like chocolate ice cream or donuts.
I’m with you on not ever knowingly eating eyes and brains (drugs too), and I add blood to the list. No black pudding for me, whether it’s english or chinese.
Mine was “Mexican pork chops” and my grandma made it….it was pork chops put into a foil oven bag with 5 cans of beans and chili sauce and chili powder and peppers and onions…and idk what else. The meat itself wasn’t horrible. But it came with so many freaking beans….oh god…my stomach hurts just thinking of it…
And then there was the time I tried to make an apple almond dessert thingy….cant even talk about that….
Chitterlings…..which are the nastiest freaking things I’ve ever touched…..
But the one thing that is normal that I still can’t eat is zucchini…..I know it’s normal and not bad but I was forced to eat it once as a kid and then I vomited on the table and now I cant eat it without remembering…
My mom used to always make me eat sausage and peppers too….it was sausage with a ton of peppers (green, yellow, red, orange) in pasta sauce served over rice….I hated peppers….and u can imagine how that went…I was forced to eat the peppers and not just the rice and sausage….I love the dish now…but then it looked gross…always went to bed hungry on those nights…
Actually the pigs feet jelly sounds kind of good, as does of course pork chops and apples. But pork is one of my favorite meats.
Worst food I came across was in Turkey – lamb eyes. Yuck.
I used to have to eat bitter melon that was hollowed out, stuffed with ground pork, and steamed. My grandmother would make it every now and then, and I don’t know if anybody has ever had bitter melon, but it’s… well, it’s exactly as advertised. It was also slightly slimy and soft. I absolutely hated it. (Though, since my grandmother passed away a few years ago, I find myself wishing I could have some, if that meant that she was here to make it for us again.)
I’m not Chinese but I like the bitter melon I’ve had; however the people I’ve had it with always sneer at the bitterness of the melon I’m eating.
I’ll put forward lutefisk ( fish preserved in lye) for horrible holiday fare. My grandfather liovedit and everyone in the family thought he was crazy. And it cooks until just before it falls apart …hard directions to follow… and stinks
Oh I second the bitter melon- although I’ve always heard it termed ‘bitter gourd’- it’s completely awful! In raw form, I always imagined it looks like Godzilla turds. In Okinawa, its called Goya, and the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten is Goya Chanpuru. This is a cold sort-of salad/stir fry with the Goya tofu, pork and egg. Blech! My grandmother always made us eat it in chanpuru form, or in a stew w/ fish “because it’s so good for you!”
I think I had Goya once. It’s not something I would need to eat again, thanks!!!
Its interesting how once in a while there is something that you don’t really like or even can’t stand… but you would consider eating it because of the memories associated with it.
One of my things is I don’t like donuts. But I will eat one about once a year because as a kid we did massive yard sales with the extended family, and the only thing they’d get for breakfast was donuts. Not sure why because that is literally the only time I ever saw donuts within a hundred yards of grandma’s house. But for the yard sale, we had donuts. Just thinking about them, I can smell grandma’s house, feel the early morning chill being nudged off my skin as the sun rises, and hear the chatter of my cousins’ voices while they set up the tables.
But the actual taste of donuts? Mildly gag-worthy, actually.
Tuna casserole with peas and potato chip topping ?….my mom used to cook it for us when we were young.
Still makes me queasy if I smell warm tuna.
Linda… Me too!! My college room mates would cook it early on the nights that I was either at school or working. They would then reverse the fans in the kitchen to draw the smell out.
Oh man this is one of mine too! Only my daughter’s love it! When my older daughter became old enough to cook she would make it for dinner for to two of them on a designated night. I agreed to work late! LOL
Your picture reminds me of the pork brawn (UK) my mother used to make post WW2. Apparently this dish was quite common during rationing when nothing was wasted. It was made from pigs trotters (sometimes from rabbit) for the meat and part of a pigs head to form the jelly. I actually didn’t mind it – it was better than dripping (beef fat) on toast.
There are three dishes I really loath and will not eat under any circumstances. One is casseroled liver – the spongy texture casseroling liver produces makes me heave, even just thinking about. Then there is tripe and onions; quite often our meal the day before pay day when money was getting tight. My mother cooked the tripe in a pressure cooker otherwise it would need to be boiled for 3 – 4 hours. It was drained and fried with onions and then thickening and milk was added. I used to dread Wednesday nights, I don’t know how I managed to keep the slimy, gloopy mess down. Nowadays, it doesn’t matter how much you dress it up or disguise it, I will always know that it’s the disgusting. slimy stomach lining of a cow. By far the worst is lava bread which my Welsh relatives used to serve up with a fried breakfast. Its made from sea kale which has to be boiled for eight hours to break it down otherwise you can’t chew or digest it. It’s disgusting, slimy and looks like a miniature cow pat on a plate and it tastes even worse. Apparently it’s a delicacy (oh yeh) and is supposed to be good for you as its rich in iodine. I only tried it once and immediately threw up. “Never mind my relatives said”, “it’s an acquired taste”. Not one I’m likely to acquire, ever.
I bet I’m not the only person who is reading through all these entries and absolutely fascinated by some of them. I would love to see and taste this lava bread.
fascinated, but also feeling kind of nauseous.
Well, yes, that too. It varies.
There are lots of places that sell it (google it) but, as it is a Welsh speciality, I would say that if you are ever in Bridgend, South Wales go to the market where they sell huge trays of the Slimy stuff. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
OMG! (I googled around a bit.) Okay, I can guess a fair bit, as I work with other products made from laver. (I’m a neurobiologist, and I work with sea slugs, and I feed them a bunch of different kinds of seaweed. And snack on several of them myself if the truth be known.) I’m still fascinated, but suspect I’d like it mostly in small quantities if at all? I’d have to see. (There are some types of seaweed preparations I adore – oh, give me a good seaweed salad! – but I suspect this might be a bit overwhelming.)
I am the first to admit that seaweed has efficacious uses especially in the medical world – colloid dressings to name but one. It’s just that I prefer not to ingest the stuff.
For me, it was a one time meal – Sunday dinner at a friend’s house. SAURBRATEN – roast soaked in vinegar as I was told. I barely got the first helping down. Seconds? No, thank you, I’m full. Scarred for life – I can barely tolerate anything with vinegar. I have a coffee pot that needs vinegar run through it and I keep putting it off because of the smell. I’m not adding a picture because there are people who like it and post their recipes. Don’t want to rain on their parade. 🙂
Sauerbraten is a specialty in Suebia, part of South Germany – if done correctly it is a beef roast marinated at least five days in a marinade with vinegar, Laurel leafs, pepper, salt. Then done as weißt with a sauce with sour cream it tastes slightly sour- only slightly. I love it with Spätzle. If you like sweet sour Asian sauces, you should be able to like it..
My Grandparents had a cattle farm. One of the “family” favorites was something that they called “liver mush”. It was probably similar to the Penn. Dutch “Scrapple”. I can’t even describe the texture. It was also thickly sliced, fried to death, krispy, gritty, with fragrant bits of meat and fat, redolent of feet. Ummm, Ummmm, good! Oh and this was a breakfast “treat”. Grandpa’s corn flakes were suddenly extremely popular.
Another family favorite was fried okra. Picture this a slimy green garden hose-like veggie, coated in corn meal, and deep fried.
I love fried okra, eat it like popcorn. My bad was boiled carrots and boiled turnip. not turnip greens which I love but the big white turnip. They forced the boiled carrot down me once and I threw up on the table. That took care of that. But the turnip had me sitting alone after everyone else had finished, I finally covered it in ketchup and choked it down. Never again.
I quite like okra too, especially as a side dish with an Indian meal.
Tuna noodle casserole with peas. Dear God what a gag fest!!!!
Let’s see, there was boxed Mac & Cheese with hotdogs, pork ‘n beans and hotdogs, macaroni and fishsticks, pork ‘n beans and fishsticks…oh, and at any point, cream corn could be added.
???
For me it was bloot suppe. My family are proud Plattdeutsche from the old Pommern area (northern Germany/Poland before WWI and WWII) which was hit very hard during WWII. In fact, there are more Plattdeutsche speakers in Wisconsin and Brazil than are left in the Pommern area because of war refugee migration. May seem like a round-about way to get to food, but it really influenced by grandparent to push hard for us to retain alot of the Plattdeutsche culture, including the food. Basically, if it was on an animal you butchered on the farm, you ate it, and mostly I was fine with that. But bloot suppe (literally “blood soup”) is the nastiest thing ever invested. It is really more of a stew than a soup because of how thick it is. You take a nice yummy soup stock, usually duck or goose, and cook down a variety of dried fruits, traditionally apples, peaches, prunes, and raisins. Add in a bunch of dumplings to soak up any juice that might have not been absorbed by the dried fruit, cause who doesn’t like to chew their soup? Then for the final touch, you add the blood of the duck or goose that you killed to make the stock. You really can’t taste it, it truthfully just thickens the soup a bit more and makes it taste even sweeter, but you know its there. And no, it doesn’t clot or anything disgusting like that, but you are still spooning up fruit and blood. The whole thing is supper sweet and thick and I can’t even smell it now without wanting to gag. We usually have it around Thanksgiving, cause that’s when most of the butchering on the farm happens, but sometimes, if I was really “lucky” growing up, Grandma would freeze some of the blood so we could have it again at Christmas. Yeah!
The concept of blood soup for Christmas is really odd to me! What church do your grandparents belong to? Because in my understanding eating blood is forbidden for all Christians. I mean it right in the Bible.
Never heard that and I am Christian. Where in the Bible does it state this?
http://www.revelation.co/2009/02/22/what-does-the-bible-say-about-blood/ There is a lot information here. I’m Orthodox Christian and we are allowed to have blood transfusion, but are forbidden from eating animal blood and I think Catholic church has the same rules.
Muslims are also forbidden to eat blood either. Halal meat is ritually slaughtered and drained of all blood.
We don’t have rituals for killing animals. Any blood that is inside the meat is ok. We believe that people should pay more attention to their belief and less to what we eat. We have fasts, but blood is the only taboo. So if you have a problem keeping fasts for any reason, you can try not watching TV, or using computer, or something else that is important enough for you, to have power over you. It is believed that breaking a habit will teach you something important about yourself.
Who is “we”. I don’t have any food rituals tied to beliefs. I am not Muslim but gleaned these facts from a Muslin friend when I was tasked with training staff to observe and facilitate the multicultural needs of clients.
I’m also quite partial to a rare steak.
The worse thing for me is beans of any kind, not counting green beans and soy beans. When I was a a kid, mo mom kept trying t o gt me to eat ham hocks and beans. There was not enough ketchup in the world to make it taste better and not make me gag and heave. Could be why I don’t like Ketchup much either.
My Mom made these two on a slow and low cook with brown sugar and honey in it. I loved it! I tried some while visiting a friend – oh dear goodness I thought I was gonna die before dinner was over. LOL
Hi
Here in Italy , especially in Sardinia is famous the casu marzu or rotten cheese that is cheese full of worms.
Infact this cheese is aged so the worms have time to eat the inside .
They said that the worms give a particular consistence and taste but I cannot bring myself to try it. It’s too gross!
I think this is the winner!!!! Just can’t imagine eating this.
OMG OK wormy cheese has got to be a winner. Although the blood soup sounds like a close second. You poor things.
I was going to vote for holodets, because I hate it too, but this is a total winner! With blood soup second.
I was thinking that variations on black pudding or blood sausage would win, but…no contest. You win.
Yep. It’s a winner. I’ve seen this nasty stuff in Spain. Just looking at it made my skin crawl.
Agree!!! This is the winner!!! This sounds absolutely GROSS!!!! *infinity vomiting*
I eat so much cheese that one of my nicknames is “cheesehead” but this is enough to make me completely stop.
Heh, my husband is from Corsica and they have the same sort of cheese. I don’t care how “good” it’s supposed to be, there is absolutely no way I’m ever trying that. It’s supposedly a delicacy. Personally, I think it’s the cheese you forgot in the cellar for far too long and only discovered one winter when stores were running low and you had no choice but to eat it.
The food that turns me off is something most people like, peanut butter. I can eat all the peanuts, peanut brittle and most peanut candy I want. When I was in my terrible twos, almost eight decades ago. My grandfather was eating his favorite snack, peanut butter mixed with maple syrup. I wanted some. My grandmother gave me a couple of spoonfuls, that wasn’t enough for me. I let them know that by having a tantrum. Without another word, my grandmother gave me a bowl full, but she wouldn’t let me get away without eating every bit of it. It didn’t take long until all the contents in my belly came right back up. To this day, I can’t eat peanut butter. My late wife, a German, and one of my daughter-in-laws, a Korean, love all kinds of rotted cabbage called kohlslau in one language and Kimchee in the other. I had to get out of the kitchen when they pigged out savoring that stuff. Then there are the aged eggs that are sold by street vendors throughout the Far East, yuck.
We went to the north of the country to visit family when I was little and they offered Gusanos de Maguey. I think to be polite with our extended relatives we ate them or to try, not sure. My mom liked them, my dad said they were not too bad and my sister hated them as much as me. So I am not sure if it was the age difference and If I had eaten them as an adult maybe I would have had a completely different experience, but at the time they were awful.
Haha. I’m a foody, get me out of here (Ant and Dec have a lot to answer for). I suppose you could close your eyes and imagine they a king prawnts but ……….no that wouldn’t work for me.
My grandmother made this too, but called it headcheese. But at least that was only on holidays, my mom used to make us fried Smelt, greasy little fish that still had fins on. Ewww!
You all have my sympathy. My dad, who was born in 1902, was ahead of his time. House rule was we had to try a dish. An honest try. If we didn’t like it, didn’t want it, we never had to eat it again. He believed that if we were offered good food at every meal we would eat a healthy diet and if we skipped some things – no big. I wouldn’t drink milk. Drove my mom nuts, but the house rule stood. Many years later during a bunch of tests it turned out I was and am lactose intolerant. Way to go Dad!
That is a wonderful house rule!!! That is what I raised my daughters with too!
I gotta say the on that still makes me gag after all the years is fried bologna, I had an aunt who always was making this and dumping a ton of ketchup on them. To this day if I smell it I’m running for the bathroom holding my nose and praying no one is in the way ??
I love this stuff!!!
My mother was of Polish descent and we had ‘Stujenina’ – jellied pork hocks – at Christmas every year. She wouldn’t tell us what was in it when we were kids – and we loved it! Still do! The pork is super flavorful and so delicious with salt, pepper, and vinegar.
Btw – boiling a pigs foot really shouldn’t be any more gross than any other properly butchered chunk of meat – chicken, etc. 🙂
My mother once fixed us a treat she remembered fondly from childhood-pork brains and eggs.
It was so awful the dog wouldn’t eat it (this animal would regularly eat dirty diapers from the garbage-nuf said).
Chicken feet was another childhood favorite of hers.
We called it head cheese. Not sure why it was called that but I liked it. My grandmother made it. I can’t get it anymore. Now as an adult I won’t eat insects. My husband tried chocolate covered ants. I like chocolate but I won’t try that! I saw this on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e-qflm0APTk. I think the family will be stronger when they recover.
You can get head cheese in France still.
I was hungry and checked the comments… Definitely cured now thanks
When I was a kid, my mother would try to stretch the food budget. So we had a lot of hamburger dishes. She also used tuna to make hot dishes or casseroles (yup I’m from Minnesota). Unfortunately she also made salmon loaf with canned salmon. It was the only thing I refused to eat. It took me years to eat salmon. And to this day, I will never eat canned salmon. Oh, it was so gross.
I know this doesn’t compare on the grossness scale with lots of you guys’ things, but the “worst” food my family made was something my grandmother served at every family gathering.
I don’t know if it has an official name, but it was a ring of lime gelatin with canned pineapple and a bit of cottage cheese mixed in. I guess she must have rinsed the cottage cheese before adding it, because the gelatin was clear enough to see little white blobs and pineapple chunks suspended in it.
Now I love pineapple, and can tolerate lime jell-o… but the flavor and texture of jell-o with cottage cheese in it gives me shivers to this day. Even though I haven’t eaten it in at least 20 years.
That would totally do it for me. Something about Jello with stuff in it!
I think the Germans have some variations on holodetz. I never was brave enough. My bane was my mother’s liver, which was the texture of slightly slimy leather.
“What are we having for dinner, Mom?”
“Lizard!”
Whatever you call it, IT DOESN’T HELP THE FLAVOR. It fought against chewing. We’d put copious amounts of barbecue sauce on it, but the vaguely gritty nastiness sort of eeled its way past your tastebuds. I don’t think Mom realized how badly she overcooked it, not having a taster gene. She continues to order liver and onions at restaurants. I avoid it like the plague.
Anyone ever had to go through the trials of lutefisk? I once read an article as a kid by a Norwegian-American, saying that it was an acquired taste…that took him twenty years to acquire. No. Just…no.
My very Scottish mother used to do liver and onions and consistently overcooked it. And yes, I totally understand the grittiness texture you mention. Those were always “scarmbled eggs night” for me, which I would cook for myself once I was old enough. I think I’ve tried it once since I left home and only because I was invited for dinner and they did it on the BBQ. It was…edible but it’s still organ food. Ewww
Chicken feet! Feel like gagging by just looking at the picture.
That is one weird looking chicken foot. Are those human nails? Unless that’s a teeny tiny bowl that is an enormous chicken foot. Where do they breed chickens that size.
I’m used to having them… I think breaded and fried, with some kind of sauce?* They were a dim sum standard, and while they weren’t a huge favorite of mine (only because they were so many other things that were) they totally a thing.
* I stopped eating land meat years ago, so it’s been a while.
That looks like cat food! Wow!!! My mom used to take boneless pork chops, pound them thin and fry them and she always served them with a homemade nice cold and tart homemade applesauce. I made applesauce once. It was hard, so I never really served the family pork chops!?
my father used to make soup from the brain of a calf when i was a kid… like this artficial slime for playing siiting in broth…. yuck!
Stuffed Bell Peppers.
No, never again. No no no no.
Catfish soup. Uugggh. My mom would make it all the time when i was younger. I would have to sit at the table and choke that down, now ican hardly stand the smell of fish.
In elementary school, I read a story about a grocery store stocker who caused all kinds of problems because he wanted to put things that go together on the same aisle- like pork chops and applesauce, I had never heard of that combination and like Ilona’s children thought it sounded terrible- which I guess is why I remember that silly story almost 40 years later!!!
I called my mother’s parenting into question when she fed us peanut butter and Miracle Whip sandwiches- but my brothers liked them!
This makes me gag every time I think of it! I live in New Zealand and I am part Maori, when I was younger we used to visit the family+extended family Marae (meeting place) Anyway they would prepare what was called a delicacy called Kanga Pirau (fermented rotten corn) this is prepared by putting corn cobs into sacks which are left in a clean running stream for up to six weeks until they have fermented. The corn kernels are then stripped from the cob, mashed and then cooked just like porridge and served either hot or cold with cream and brown sugar. It really smells like month old garbage and I wretched every time I went! (Shudder)
Kippers and blood pudding for breakfast. Kippers are smoked herrings, they would be heated and served with panfried blood pudding. Basically fishbones with very little flesh with blood disguised as sausage with lumps of fat in it. Absolutely disgusting.
Also, tinned salmon. Used to get salmon salad sandwiches in my lunch bag. Unfortunately the tinned salmon my Mom used still had the vertebrae and she never removed them.
Between the the tinned salmon and the kippers, it wasn’t until I discovered sushi that I actually started enjoying fish.
Cows tongue and raw oysters. I call them sea snot.
My father adored this. After my mother died, I had to make it for him. YUCK
Beef tongue
Stovetop Stuffing. My whole family and a good portion of the US seems to love this stuff, but it is horrible! My parents would give me about two spoonfuls on my plate and make me sit at the table until I ate it. It would hit my tongue, my throat would close and then I would sit with it in my mouth for 5 minutes trying to force it down while simultaneously dry heaving. Spit it out and repeat for about two hours until bedtime! 🙂
I don’t feel so bad with having to eat fried liver and onions!! Since I became a teenager I haven’t had to eat it and to this day I have never brought it into our home except for my dogs! My teenage boys don’t know how lucky they are!!
For me its beans (dont like the texture) pit’cha (cow hooves boiled and then im not sure how but its served like a jelly but im pretty sure theres ligaments in there) and schmaltz (fried chicken fat) and s’chug (smells like sweat). No matter how its served it smells and tastes like sweat. My husband is always trying to hide it in food so il eat it and i smell it from 3 ft away… I can go on and on…. Im jewish so we have a food for everything and some of them are just appealing!
*unappealing
Stuffing, can never understand how so many love this mush
Meatloaf, I used to love meatloaf when I was a kid until my mom showed me how to make when I was younger I’m darn near 30 and still won’t eat the meatloaf my mother cooks.
Cooked carrots
Green bean casserole
Tomatoes, cold and slimy no thanks
Mushrooms
And then this egg my bf family loves call balut, developing bird embryo that is boiled and eaten from the shell. Sorry that is so wrong and nasty in soooooo many ways to me. It’s even worse see them eat it…
Ground beef version of white sausage gravy called shit on a shingle. Yes that is what my parents called it (probably 90% of the reason I couldn’t choke it down)
I also hate soggy bread so that just made it worse.
?
Am I too late to bring up lutefisk? For those lucky enough to not have traumatic memories of this, it is cod cured in lye. While I have never personally had the pleasure of actually preparing it, my understanding is that the fish is first soaked in water for 5-6 days, then soaked in lye for several additional days, and finally once again, back into the water bath for another 5-6 days. The fish is served cold and the water/lye baths break down the proteins in the fish, creating a swollen, jelly-like texture. It is a holiday “treat” which luckily, one can easily avoid as an adult as the specific stench can be smelled for blocks. For kids who lack the political authority to refuse holiday visits to grandma’s house, the smell is nightmare-inducing. My small liberal-arts college also served it for the Christmas meal at the end of the fall semester. The cafeteria then had to be aired out during the weeks of winter break, prior to reopening for the spring semester.
My Mother made pickled pigs knuckles once (eisbein) and the smell was unbelievable, I begged her that when she went to eat it,( because you have to let it pickle a while) that she pick a night when I was out babysitting so that I would not have to smell it again. I also can not stand canned tuna, I just can not get over the smell. Fortunately my Mother was not one to make you eat anything you didn’t want to eat.
I had wanted to post about the first time I tried to make baked chicken and gravy over rice, but wormy cheese and blood soup and grubs…. needless to say I can tell when I’m beat. Way to be troopers everyone, take it from a picky eater I know keeping a straight face some times demands courage. lol
I don’t know if someone talked about it already but I would say “Fafaru”. My family is tahitian and when we meet, we eat it. It’s supposed to make us stronger in our culture. Basically, we let marinated fresh fish in fermented seawater (called “Miti fafaru”) for days. All these years and I never could manage to eat all my plate… It has a very strong smell because of the fermented seawater and just.. ew. It doesn’t taste any better (to me anyway), everything is just overwhelmed by that smell that follows you everywhere.
Holodetz. Ick! I’ve had to politely eat that in Central Asia. Gross! The worst foods I ate growing up were all cooked by my Scottish grandma – beef tongue, brains and tripe. Ugh! Oh, and my Mum and Dad liked liver. I don’t do offal!
Love Brains, Pigs Trotters, Pigs head, Cows tongue, Haggis, Faggots…its just protein…delicious. Just don’t make the gravy lumpy in my opinion. XX
I wasn’t forced to eat anything as a child because, well, nobody could really force me to do anything if I didn’t want to, and short of shoving food down my throat, there was no way I would eat some of the delicacies that my family served on special occasions.
I’m from Eastern Europe and we have a dish very similar to your holodetz. It’s called “hladetina” or “sulc” and made pretty much as you described, the only difference being that the pig legs, tails, ears and whatever else is inside are not chopped, but left whole. It makes it even more disgusting to look at. Imagine waking up in the morning and opening the fridge to get something for breakfast and there’s a pig leg in jelly staring at you! I swear I saw an eye in the dreadful thing once, though my dad claims it was impossible because the eye would disintegrate during cooking due to high temperature. Whatever, I would swear I saw a pig eye in the bowl staring right back at me!
We also have blood sausage that is called “krvavica” and it looks awful and smells even worse. My mom and dad had fried pig brains every New Year’s Eve as a special treat, thankfully they never made us try it. My dad used to make an especially disgusting dish, I’m not sure how to translate it but it’s basically some sort of stew made out of pig lungs. The particularly disgusting thing about it is that the lungs are, well, filled with air, so they swim on top of the dreadful thing… I can’t begin to describe how disgusting that looks, and smells!
I also hated it when they made pig kidney stew. You wouldn’t believe how awful that smells… Like a men’s room at a very busy train station that hasn’t been cleaned, well, ever!
Although I wasn’t made to eat any of these things, just looking at them and smelling them was so traumatic for me that I’m vegan today, thank you very much!
You should try “pieds et paquets marseillais”. It is lamb foots, and intestines rolled with bacon, parsley and garlic. You put this in a tomato sauce and cook in oven for 4 hours. I love it, but i know that out of Marseille, it’s a bit difficult to appresiate…
Oatmeal flakes’ jelly.
I don’t know what’s worse, the taste or the smell while it is being prepared.
My great-aunt made it for her husband as a rare treat.
She put about 3 kilos of raw oatmeal flakes in a large bowl, poured it over with hot water and added some pieces of rye bread. Then she let the brew ferment in a warm place for about 3 days. Imagine the smell. Slowly rotting oatmeal.
Next, she poured the half-rotten mass through a sieve, and put the remaining liquid into a pot and boiled it on low heat for about an hour. The mass slowly got thicker, smelling something fierce all the time. When it was ready, she divided it into smaller bowls and put them into the cold-pantry to solidify.
I hated it. The taste was a bit sour, a bit bitter yet bland, the texture sticky and grainy at the same time, the colour unappealingly beige, the smell – foul.
My great-uncle loved it. He ate it with milk, and sometimes a bit of sugar. He grew up in extreme poverty just after WWI, so that might explain it.
I actually found a recipe with pictures: http://www.maminuklubs.lv/sieviesu-klubs/20120827-auzu-parslu-kiselis-ar-bernibas-garsu-/
My parents were poor and could not always pay the bills. We had “milk toast.” which was awful.